Je. Hunter et Fl. Schmidt, Racial and gender bias in ability and achievement tests - Resolving the apparent paradox, PSYCH PUB L, 6(1), 2000, pp. 151-158
The study of potential racial and gender bias in individual test items is a
major research area today. The fact that research has established that tot
al scores on ability and achievement tests are predictively unbiased raises
the question of whether there is in fact any real bias at the item level.
No theoretical rationale for expecting such bias has been advanced. It appe
ars that findings of item bias (differential item functioning; DIF) can be
explained by three factors: failure to control for measurement error in abi
lity estimates, violations of the unidimensionality assumption required by
DIF detection methods, and reliance on significance testing (causing tiny a
rtifactual DIF effects to be statistically significant because sample sizes
are very large). After taking into account these artifacts, there appears
to be no evidence that items on currently used tests function differently i
n different racial and gender groups.