Contributions to the Quantitative Assessment of Item, Test, and Score Fairness

Abstract

ETS has been a leader in the development of quantitative procedures for fairness assessment, and its efforts are reviewed in this chapter. The first section deals with differential prediction and differential validity procedures that examine whether test scores predict a criterion, such as performance in college, across different subgroups in a similar manner. The second section, constituting the bulk of the chapter, focuses on item-level fairness, or differential item functioning. In the third section, research is considered pertaining to whether tests built to the same set of specifications produce scores that are related in the same way across different gender and ethnic groups. Limitations of the approaches are discussed in the final section.