| Abstract: | This study examined the effects of gender-related item-wording changes on the performance of male and female examinees. Mathematics word problems and English language items were created in neuter, male, and female versions. Items were administered to randomly equivalent samples of about 300 high school juniors and seniors. Loglinear analysis was used to assess the impact of item gender and its interaction with examinee sex on the difficulty and discrimination of each item in each context. No items were found to have sex bias in either context. Mathematics items did not have different difficulty or discrimination in the three gender versions. Neither mathematics nor English items had different discrimination levels in the three gender-related versions. Some English items, however, were found to have different difficulty levels in the three gender-related versions. These difficulty differences were not systematic." none of the three gender versions appeared consistently more or less difficult than the others. |
