Session Information
09 SES 07 A, Findings from International Comparative Achievement Studies. Symposium Session 3: Issues in Constructing Mathematics Tests
Symposium
Contribution
In Germany, academic achievement at school depends primarily on the students’ socioeconomic status (SES). This contribution tries to find an explanation for this fact and adopts a socio-linguistic perspective: the language used at school contains specific speech variants that differ from the language experiences of low SES children. It is language skills – predominantly learned within families, their social strata and cultural rearing – that determine the chances of successful participation in school. Using the techniques of Differential Item Functioning (DIF) and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), this paper focuses on German items within the domain of mathematics (TIMSS 2007) to analyze language-based characteristics determining challenges in those items that are more difficult to handle for low than for high SES students. In doing so, this contribution tries to approach the problem of hidden language-based demands within items of international Large-Scale-Assessments by analyzing both the condition of items and the way students solve items. Mathematics items have been chosen to make sure that the competencies the items are constructed for measuring predominantly do not focus on the level of language but on mathematics competencies. According partial analyses within the context of a PhD project (Walzebug, in progress) will be introduced and discussed.
Method
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.