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• Item wording effects occur when positively and negatively worded items used together. • Item wording effects may distort the factorial structure of self-report measures. • The severity of item wording effects is associated with the level of reading ability. • Removing careless responses can alleviate the impact of item wording effects. This study examined the impact of item wording effects on the factor structure of the Student Confidence in Reading (SCR) scale in the 2016 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). First, using a large sample of students from seven English-speaking countries, item wording effects in the SCR scale were investigated for the entire sample and the subgroups of students based on their reading achievement levels in PIRLS 2016. Second, the presence of item wording effects was re-examined after identifying and removing students who answered negatively worded items inconsistently. The results showed that the use of negatively worded items distorted the factor structure of the SCR scale, leading to an unintentionally multidimensional factor structure. Removing students with careless responses had a negligible impact on the model fit for students at the lowest achievement level, whereas it considerably improved the model fit for other students with moderate to high reading achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Cognitive Abilities (WJ IV COG) is a comprehensive assessment battery designed to assess broad and narrow cognitive abilities, as defined by the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory of intelligence. Previous studies examined the invariance of the WJ assessments across sex and age groups using factor analytic methods. Psychometric network modeling is an alternative methodology that can address both direct and indirect relationships among the observed variables. In this study, we employed psychometric network modeling to examine the invariance of the WJ IV COG across sex and age groups. Using a normative sample (n = 4212 participants) representative of the United States population, we tested the extent to which the factorial structure of the WJ IV COG aligned with CHC theory for the school-aged sample. Next, we used psychometric network modeling as a data-driven method to investigate whether the network structure of the WJ IV COG remains similar across different sex and age (age 6 to 19, inclusively) groups. Our results showed that the WJ IV COG maintained the same network structure across all age and sex groups, although the network structure at younger ages indicated weaker relationships among some subtests. Overall, the results provide construct validity evidence for the WJ IV COG, based on both theoretical and data-driven methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]