Test-Response Variations Between Hearing-Impaired and Hearing Students
A sample of 508 hearing-impaired students were administered a language-arts achievement test containing 25 items drawn from a computerized item bank developed with hearing students. A Rasch analysis was performed to determine if the item responses of the hearing-impaired students were comparable to those of the hearing students. Also, an analysis was undertaken to determine whether selected demographic and deafness-related characteristics could account for differencs in item-response patterns between hearing-impaired students and hearing students with similar raw scores. Results showed that the items did not form an adequate Rasch-based test. Furthermore, the difficulty order of the items differed in the hearing and hearing-impaired calibrations. The analysis of item-response patterns revealed no differences between subgroups of the sample. The article discusses the comparability of test scores and the use of test-score information by educators of the hearing impaired.