Open Conference Systems, ITC 2016 Conference

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PAPER: Fairness in Testing: Evaluating the Alignment of Recommendations and Practices
Jessica L Jonson, Betty Jean Usher-Tate

Building: Pinnacle
Room: 3F-Port of San Francisco
Date: 2016-07-02 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Last modified: 2016-05-22

Abstract


A substantive change to the 2014 Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA, & NCME, 2014) was the elevation of fairness in testing as a foundational element of practice in addition to validity and reliability.  This study will review the extent to which this growing emphasis on fairness practices since the 1985 Standards is aligned with current practices as documented in test manuals of commercially available tests.  To conduct this investigation, the manuals of several commercially available ability and achievement tests will be reviewed by multiple researchers to determine the extent to which key fairness practices identified in the 2014 Standards and ITC Guidelines for Test Use (ITC, 2013) are addressed by the test publishers/developers.  The review will include the use of Universal Design, appropriate documentation for accommodations/modifications, the representativeness of potential test taking population in norms, validation studies on group differences, reliability/precision studies by group, and recommended test score interpretations and uses based on documented fairness research.  This review is currently underway, and preliminary results indicate that although some effort to address fairness in test development is common, these efforts are not well documented nor conducted as extensively as recommended.  In addition, the results of fairness studies often are not cited when making recommendations about test use and interpretation. This investigation will (a) prompt a discussion of how well aligned actual fairness practices are with recommendations, (b) evaluate how informative and transparent test manuals are regarding fairness studies, and (c) highlight practical applications for addressing fairness recommendations from the 2014 Standards and ITC Guidelines.  The goal of this study is to raise awareness about the importance of fairness practices and prompt discussions about how the Standards might be applied or provide better guidance in the future.


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