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The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability Revised — systematically biased?
Author(s) -
McKay Michael
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
british journal of educational psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.557
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 2044-8279
pISSN - 0007-0998
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8279.1996.tb01194.x
Subject(s) - test (biology) , psychology , equivalence (formal languages) , comprehension , reading comprehension , assertion , stratified sampling , developmental psychology , reading (process) , item analysis , statistics , psychometrics , linguistics , mathematics , computer science , paleontology , philosophy , biology , programming language
The aim of this study was to assess the claims by Stothard & Hulme (1991) that the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability Revised is systematically biased against boys, suffers from an inappropriate gradation in question difficulty in the comprehension subtest of Form 2 of the test and that as a consequence, Form 1 and Form 2 of the test are not parallel. A stratified random sampling procedure based on socio‐economic status of schools in Victoria, Australia, was used to select 250 children who were administered both forms of the test. The results suggest that girls and boys do not differ significantly at different age levels in Accuracy or Comprehension scores on either form of the test. Mean Comprehension scores for passages 5 and 6 of Form 2 of the Australian edition of the test were in the expected direction for both boys and girls, supporting the test's assertion regarding the item difficulty for each passage. Further reliability data are provided to support the equivalence of the norms for each form claimed by the test manual. In summary no evidence has been found in these data to support the claims of Stothard & Hulme.