An item analysis of the French version of the Test for Reception of Grammar among children and adolescents with Down syndrome or intellectual disability of undifferentiated etiology
Facon, Bruno; Magis, David
2016 • In Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 59, p. 1190-1197
[en] Purpose: An item analysis of Bishop’s (1983) Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG) in its French version (F-TROG, Lecocq, 1996) was conducted to determine whether the difficulty of items is similar for participants with or without intellectual disability (ID).
Method: In Study 1, responses to the 92 F-TROG items by 55 participants with Down syndrome (DS), 55 with ID of undifferentiated etiology (UND) and 55 typical children (TYP) matched on their F-TROG total score were compared using the transformed item difficulties method, a statistical approach designed to detect differential item functioning (DIF) between groups. In Study 2, an additional comparison involving 526 TYP participants and 526 participants with UND was conducted to increase the statistical power of the analysis.
Results: The difficulty of items was highly similar whatever the sample size or clinical status of
participants. Fewer than 3.5 % of the items were flagged as showing DIF.
Conclusions: Tests such as the TROG can be used with confidence in clinical practice as well as in research studies comparing participants with or without ID. Methods designed for investigating potential internal test bias – such as done here – should be more regularly employed in the developmental disability field to affirm the absence of DIF.
Disciplines :
Education & instruction
Author, co-author :
Facon, Bruno
Magis, David ; Université de Liège > Département des Sciences de l'éducation > Psychométrie et édumétrie
Language :
English
Title :
An item analysis of the French version of the Test for Reception of Grammar among children and adolescents with Down syndrome or intellectual disability of undifferentiated etiology
Publication date :
2016
Journal title :
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
ISSN :
1092-4388
eISSN :
1558-9102
Publisher :
American Speech Language Hearing Association, Rockville, United States - Maryland
Abbeduto, L., Warren, S. F., & Conners, F. A. (2007). Language development in Down syndrome: From the prelinguistic period to the acquisition of literacy. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 13, 247–261.
American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, National Council on Measurement in Education. (1999). Standards for educational and psychological testing. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Angoff, W. H., & Ford, S. F. (1973). Item–race interaction on a test of scholastic aptitude. Journal of Educational Measurement, 10, 95–106.
Berglund, E., Eriksson, M., & Johansson, I. (2001). Parental reports of spoken language skills in children with Down syndrome. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 44, 179–191.
Bishop, D. V. M. (1983). Test for Reception Of Grammar. Manchester, UK: Chapel Press.
Bishop, D. V. M. (2003). The Test for Reception of Grammar, Version 2 (TROG-2). London: Psychological Corporation.
Boehm, A. E. (2009). Boehm 3. Test des concepts de base (troisième édition) [Boehm Test of Basic Concepts-3]. Paris: Les Editions du Centre de Psychologie Appliquée.
Camilli, G. (2013). Ongoing issues in test fairness. Educational Research and Evaluation, 19, 104–120.
Carrow-Woolfolk, E. (1999). Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language–Third Edition. Circle Pines, MN: AGS.
Chapman, R. S. (2006). Language learning in Down syndrome: The speech and language profile compared to adolescents with cognitive impairment of unknown origin. Down Syndrome: Research & Practice, 10, 61–66.
Chapman, R. S., & Kay-Raining Bird, E. (2012). Language development in childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in persons with Down syndrome. In J. A. Burack, R. M. Hodapp, G. Iarocci, & E. Zigler (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of intellectual disability and development (2nd ed., pp. 167–183). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Chapman, R. S., Seung, H. K., Schwartz, S. E., & Kay-Raining Bird, E. (1998). Language skills of children and adolescents with Down syndrome: II. Production deficits. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 41, 861–873.
Dunn, L. M., Thériault-Whalen, C. M., & Dunn, L. M. (1993). Echelle de Vocabulaire en Images Peabody. Adaptation française du Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Revised [Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Revised French adaptation]. Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada: Psycan.
Educational Testing Service. (2008). Guidelines for constructed-response and other performance assessments. Princeton, NJ: Author.
Facon, B., Magis, D., & Belmont, J. M. (2011). Beyond matching on the mean in developmental disabilities research. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 32, 2134–2147.
Facon, B., Magis, D., & Courbois, Y. (2012). On the difficulty of relational concepts among participants with Down syndrome. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 33, 60–68.
Facon, B., & Nuchadee, M.-L. (2010). An item analysis of Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices among participants with Down syndrome. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 31, 243–249.
Facon, B., Nuchadee, M.-L., & Bollengier, T. (2012). A qualitative analysis of general receptive vocabulary of adolescents with Down syndrome. American Journal on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, 117, 243–259.
Fowler, A. E., Gelman, R., & Gleitman, L. R. (1994). The course of language learning in children with Down syndrome. In H. Tager-Flusberg (Ed.), Constraints on language acquisition: Studies of atypical children (pp. 91–140). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hambleton, R. K., & Swaminathan, H. (1985). Item response theory. Boston, MA: Kluwer-Nijhoff.
Lecocq, P. (1996). L’ECOSSE: une épreuve de compréhension syntaxico-sémantique [The ECOSSE: A syntaxico-semantic test of comprehension]. Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion.
Lenneberg, E. H. (1967). Biological foundations of language. New York, NY: Wiley.
Leonard, L. (2014). Children with specific language impairment and their contribution to the study of language development. Journal of Child Language, 41, 38–47.
Magis, D., Béland, S., Tuerlinckx, F., & De Boeck, P. (2010). A general framework and an R package for the detection of dichotomous differential item functioning. Behavior Research Methods, 42, 847–862.
Magis, D., & Facon, B. (2012). Angoff ’s Delta method revisited: Improving the DIF detection under small samples. British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, 65, 302–321.
Magis, D., & Facon, B. (2013). Item purification does not always improve DIF detection: A counter-example with Angoff’s Delta plot. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 73, 293–311.
Magis, D., & Facon, B. (2014). deltaPlotR: An R package for differential item functioning analysis with Angoff’s Delta plot. Journal of Statistical Software, 59, 1–19.
Maller, S. J. (1997). Deafness and WISC-III item difficulty: Invariance and fit. Journal of School Psychology, 35, 299–314.
Maller, S. J. (2001). Differential item functioning in the WISC-III: Item parameters for boys and girls in the national standardization sample. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 61, 793–817.
Næss, K. B., Halaas Lyster, S., Hulme, C., & Melby-Lerväg, M. (2011). Language and verbal short-term memory skills in children with Down syndrome: A meta-analytic review. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 32, 2225–2234.
O’Hearn, K., & Landau, B. (2007). Mathematical skill in individuals with Williams syndrome: Evidence from a standardized mathematics battery. Brain and Cognition, 64, 238–246.
Raven, J. C., Court, J. H., & Raven, J. (1998). Progressive Matrices Couleur [Colored Progressive Matrices]. Paris: Les Editions du Centre de Psychologie Appliquée.
Ring, M., & Clahsen, H. (2005). Distinct patterns of language impairment in Down’s syndrome and Williams syndrome: The case of syntactic chains. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 18, 479–501.
Roberts, J. E., Price, J., & Malkin, C. (2007). Language and communication development in Down syndrome. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 13, 26–35.
Rondal, J. A., & Edwards, S. (1997). Language in mental retardation. Philadelphia, PA: Whurr.
Tager-Flusberg, H., Calkins, S., Nolin, T., & Baumberger, T. (1990). A longitudinal study of language acquisition in autistic and Down syndrome children. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 20, 1–21.
Wechsler, D. (1991). Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children– Third Edition. San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation.
Weisz, J. R. (1990).Cultural-familialmentalretardation:Ade-velopmental perspective on cognitive performance and “help-less” behavior. In R. M. Hodapp, J. A. Burack, & E. Zigler (Eds.), Issues in the developmental approach to mental retardation (pp. 137–168). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
