Gender Differential Item Functioning Research On High School Geography Examination

Test fairness is one of the core content of education fairness and the material embodiment,and it has been the most popular and critical issues of social and educational research.Test item fairness is the core that affects test fairness,also is the important aspect that evaluates exam quality.With the advancement of the new curriculum reform and the reform of the college entrance examination program,the proportion of geography as an elective subject in the college entrance examination has also increased significantly.Clarifying whether there are gender differences in the high school geography academic test and whether Differential Item Functioning can explain these gender differences(DIF),will help improve the quality of the test paper and promote fairness in the test.This study selects the test papers of seven mock examinations of high school geography academic level in S district and L city in 2017 and 2018,as well as the test scores of 18,586 high school students who participated in these seven exams.Next,analyzes the gender DIF of the seven exams by SPSS 23 and DIFAS software.And then,analyzes the causes of gender DIF from the perspective of question characteristics by combining content analysis and quantitative analysis.The results show that there is an absolute gender difference in high school geography achievement.Among the 277 items in the seven exams,103 items showed different degrees of gender DIF,among which 12 were severe gender DIF for boys,and 5 were severe gender DIF for girls.The gender differences of the exam score will go down when eliminating the severe gender DIF items.Besides,the DIF items,which are favorable to boys,are mostly presented as a novel context or closely related to questions,or the item topic focus on "map and geographic information technology".Based on the conclusion of this study,some suggestions are put forward for the geographical examination developers,question quality evaluators,and subsequent DIF researchers.Geography education experts can incorporate DIF analysis into the proposition and test analysis of important geography exams,treat specific topics or question context carefully in the geographical proposition and try their best to avoid gender DIF,which may be caused by different interests or degrees of familiarity,to promote the fairness of geography exams.