Fairness Issues in Educational Assessment

Fairness and ethicality have been at the center of the debates on the appropriate use of educational tests since the 1960s. Particularly in high-stakes contexts, it is clear that fairness should be a major concern to both the test developers, and to those being tested, given that the fairness of a test is so intertwined with its validity.

Fairness Issues in Educational Assessment aims to shed more light on the issue and bring to sight some of the ways in which test fairness can be addressed. The contributions, written by some of the most prominent figures in educational assessment, address both theoretical and practical aspects of test fairness. The wealth of ideas presented here will be valuable to novice researchers and help them appreciate both the joy and complexity of conducting fair educational measurement.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Research and Evaluation.

Introduction1. Ongoing issues in test fairness2. A "conditional" sense of fairness in assessment3. The unfairness of equal treatment: objectivity in L2 testing and dynamic assessment4. The quest for fairness in language testing5. Decisions that make a difference in detecting differential item functioning6. Identifying differential item functioning in multi-stage computer adaptive testing7. Assessing statistical aspects of test fairness with structural equation modelling8. The formalization of fairness: issues in testing for measurement invariance using subtest scores9. Generalizability theory and the fair and valid assessment of linguistic minorities

Hossein Karami is a Lecturer in the English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, at the University of Tehran, Iran. His areas of interest include validity and fairness, especially in the context of language testing. His work has appeared in various journals including Educational Research and Evaluation, RELC Journal, Psychological Test and Assessment Modeling, TESOL Journal, and Asia-Pacific Education Review.