Factors Affecting the Difficulty of Verbal Analogies

Roccas, Sonia; Moshinsky, Avital

doi:10.1207/s15324818ame1602_1

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…VA tests require the test-taker to complete an analogy by choosing one or two missing words (Goswami, 1991;Roccas & Moshinsky, 2003). In order to complete this task, the test-taker needs to understand the meaning of the question's words, determine the relationship between the words, and complete the analogy so that each pair of words have the same relationship (Roccas & Moshinsky, 2003). Analogies typically consist of a stem of two or three words that are to be matched to a correct answer from a number of response alternatives in a multiple choice format (Ulstadius, Carlstedt, & Gustafsson, 2008).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Analogies are often used in classrooms to aid learning in other areas such as decoding and comprehension, by facilitating the understanding of difficult texts in reading comprehension tasks and improving comprehension in science (Goswami, 1991). They are also commonly used in tests designed to predict academic success (Roccas & Moshinsky, 2003).…”

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“…In the adaptation of VA scales from one language to another, it has to be taken into consideration that the difficulty of verbal analogy items is influenced by a number of factors such as word-rarity (Ulstadius et al, 2008), the inclusion of a negative component (i.e., negative wording), and the order of words in the analogy (Roccas & Moshinsky, 2003). These factors should also be taken into account when developing, adapting, and/or translating analogy items.…”

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An item and construct bias analysis of two language versions of a verbal analogies scale

Roomaney

Koch

2013

South African Journal of Psychology

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The Woodcock Muñoz Language Survey is a test of cognitive academic language proficiency that has been adapted from English into Xhosa by a South African team of researchers. This study was primarily concerned with the Verbal Analogies Scale of the Woodcock Muñoz Language Survey and aimed to extend previous research on the equivalence of the two language versions of the scale. The study employed a monolingual two-group design consisting of 150 mainly English-speaking and 149 mainly Xhosa learners in Grades 6 and 7. The first research objective was to investigate item bias (or differential item functioning items) in the Visual Analogies Scale across the Xhosa and English versions using logistic regression and Mantel-Haenszel statistical techniques. Five items were identified as differential item functioning. The second objective was to evaluate the construct equivalence of the two versions by conducting a factor analysis after removing the differential item functioning items from the scale. Two factors were identified. The first factor displayed significant loadings across both language versions. The second factor was stable for the English version but not for the Xhosa version. Results were supported by calculating a Tucker's phi coefficient for both factors. It was therefore concluded that Factor 1 is structurally equivalent across the two language versions but that Factor 2 was not structurally equivalent. Thus, the detection and removal of differential item functioning items did not result in structural equivalence.

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