Differential Item Functioning in the National Tests in Religious Education in Sweden

Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Evaluating Education: Normative Systems and Institutional Practices book series (ENSIP)

Abstract

The Mantel-Haenszel method is used to investigate whether there are items in the national tests in religious education from 2013 exhibiting differential item functioning (DIF) between groups of students. DIF in an item means that the item functions differently between two groups, after adjusting for the two groups’ overall abilities. Two comparisons are made: between boys and girls and between native speakers and pupils with Swedish as their second language. The results of the analysis lead, for example, to the speculation that closed format items exhibiting DIF are more likely to favour boys than girls and the reverse speculation holds for items of open format. Having data from only two tests, these speculations need to be investigated further with data from later tests.

In addition to the DIF analysis, some descriptive statistics concerning the pupils’ results on the tests are presented, in particular the results on the items relating to ethics.

Keywords

Differential Item Functioning Item Response Theory National Test Religious Education Dichotomous Item 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Mathematical SciencesChalmers University of Technology and University of GothenburgGothenburgSweden

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