Revising SAT-Verbal Items To Eliminate Differential Item Functioning. College Board Report No. 93-2.

Based on initial Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) Verbal pretest data and hypotheses advanced in the research literature, 7 sentence completion and 16 analogy items with extreme levels of differential item functioning (DIF) were selected and then systematically revised and re-administered in an attempt to reduce or eliminate DIF. The apparent success of the effort makes similar attempts worth continuing. The particular terminology used in stems and keys, rather than the underlying skill being measured, seemed to be a recurring source of DIF in the SAT-Verbal items. Larger sample sizes, especially for minority focal groups, would help to stabilize the DIF categories used by Educational Testing Service (ETS) test developers. In addition, because the ETS delta metric is unbounded at the extremes, the use of both the Standardization (p-metric) and Mantel-Haenszel (delta-metric) methodologies is recommended for classifying the level of DIF for very easy and very difficult items. Further research is suggested to study the possible relationship between DIF and predictive validity. Nine tables and four figures present analysis results. An appendix summarizes DIF hypotheses. (Contains 26 references.) (Author/SLD)