Substantive and Cognitive Interpretations of Gender DIF on a Fractions Concept Test

Much previous research has been done in analyzing gender differential item functioning (DIF). Most of it has involved dissimilitude in performance on quantitative type items. DIF studies have been conducted since Eells, Davis, Havighurst, Herrick, and Tyler (1951) tried to differentiate between test items that favored children who came from a high SES background from those items that favored children from low SES households. Since then, dozens of studies have been published on the subject. One of the first gender DIF studies was done by Hambleton and Traub (1974), who explored the multi-dimensional effects between gender and item order on math tests, but the results were inconclusive. Some subsequent gender DIF studies were more profound in their conclusions, with certain dissimilarities of results realized between them. In general, it was determined that boys and girls do indeed perform differently on different types of questions. Plake and associates (1982) found that boys did better than girls on timed tests where the difficult items were back loaded. Word problems were found to be “differentially easier ” for boys, as were any problems “requiring higher level thinking skills”, including geometry and arithmetic, while girls and boys did equally well on test items involving spatial component