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International Journal of Educational Research 39 (2003) 551563 www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedures

Chapter 3

Multivariate analyses of student response prolesacross countries and gender

Peter Allerup
Danish University of Education, Emdrupvej 101, DK 2400, Copenhagen NV, Denmark

Abstract Phase one of the IEA Civic Study was designed for fourteen-year-old students. In Denmark this included students from the eighth and ninth grades although civics is not part of the required curriculum until grade nine. Students answers to questions concerning civic knowledge were collected together with information related to student attitudes, which provided information on their perceptions of democratic values. This article analyses and compares the structure of responses to the attitude questions across countries participating in the Civic Study and investigates the relationship between knowledge (knowledge of content, Type 1) and attitudes in terms of a gender perspective. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Many IEA Studies, such as the Reading Literacy Study (Elley, 1992) and the TIMSS Mathematics and Science Study (Beaton& Albert, 1996), include a number of questions or items that constitute a set of dependent object variables, whose variation will subsequently be explained by a set of independent variables, predictors, or so-called controlling variables. Generally, the initial statistical analyses investigate the relationship between the dependent and the independent variables to identify whether there are any signicant correlations among them. The traditional perception of, e.g., reading ability being controlled, or predicted from a series of
E-mail address: nimmo@dpu.dk (P. Allerup). 0883-0355/$ - see front matter r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijer.2004.07.004

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student and teacher background variables, lead the analyst to regress dependent variables on the independent variables to determine those variables most responsible for the variation of a dependent variable. It is, furthermore part of the same thinking to believe, that, after having established a well-tting statistical model describing the relationship, those independent variables that are malleable can be used to introduce changes in the student environment with positive effects on the level of reading ability. In large part, this reasoning is not valid for the Civic Education Study. Although knowledge and skills questions are organised together in one booklet, and democratic values are caught by a series of attitude questions in a separate booklet, the role of dependent and independent variables is not clearly assigned to either set of questions. Knowledge and skills can be derived from student attitudes and their composition of democratic values or, equally, democratic values may presume the existence of knowledge and skills and can therefore be derived from this knowledge. Statistical analyses of Civic Study data, however, can determine, which set of variables are the genuine independent and dependent variables at a later stage, since most regression analyses are, in fact conditional analyses, where mainly for technical convenience, one set of variables is kept as the conditioning, independent variables. With this background in mind, we have selected knowledge as the dependent variable and the attitude questions as independent variables. Thus, this article will explore the relationship between civic knowledge and student democratic values in a regression design using the attitude questions as the independent variables. In contrast to many other IEA Studies, the Civic Education Study emerged as a study where initial statistical analyses of question-by-question information led to scales information. In fact, statistical analyses and modelling by means of Rasch Models (Rasch, 1960; Fischer et al., 1995; Allerup, 1994) aimed at evaluating whether student attitudes could be assessed by calculating a one-dimensional student score across a number of questions, rather than keeping track of the complete student response pattern across the set of individual questions. The rst international cross country report (Torney-Purta, Lehman, Oswald, & Schulz, 2001) and the Danish National Civic Report (Bruun, 2001) take advantage of these analyses, and then present the results in terms of analyses of Rasch Scores as outcome scores from two scales of knowledge and skills and from 11 student attitude scales. This strategy will also be employed in this article.

2. Data collection The sampling procedures for the Civic Study in Denmark were dened according to the international sampling plan; thus, N = 3100 students in grade eight and N = 2600 students in grade nine were sampled. In addition to the international Civic questions, students were also given a number of specic Danish questions as a national option.

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P. Allerup / Int. J. Educ. Res. 39 (2003) 551563 Table 1 One scale for assessing civic knowledge and 11 scales used for measuring student attitudes Name KNOWLMLE CTCONMLE 1 CTSOCMLE 2 GOVECMLE 3 GOVSOMLE 4 TRUSTMLE 5 PATRIMLE 6 WOMRTMLE 7 IMMIGMLE 8 CONFSMLE 9 POLATMLE 10 CCLIMMLE 11 Content Knowledge Scale Conventional Citizenship Social Movement Citizenship Government Responsibility, Society Economy Government Responsibility, Society General Trust in Institutions Patriotism Womens Rights Immigrants School Participation Political Activities Classroom Climate 553

3. Instruments The knowledge scale and the 11 attitude scales are listed in Table 1 with abbreviations for the scale names, as these will be the terms used in our discussion. The international knowledge scale reports student Rasch scores as measures of knowledge; these values are on an international basis constrained to mean value = 100 and standard deviation=20. The attitude scales are also constrained internationally, but these scales have been anchored to mean value = 10 and standard deviation = 2.

4. Data analysisstructure of responses to attitude scales Before analysing the relationship between civic knowledge and democratic values derived from the 11 attitude scales, the internal structure of student responses to all 11 scales should be investigated. How do responses to the scales correlate? Does the space spanned by the 11 scales enjoy a simpler structure? How can general differences among student responses for all scales be investigated simultaneously? And, nally, are any gender differences revealed by the scales?

5. Classical correlation analysis One way of addressing the problem of correlation structure is to test whether the content of the 11 scales can be caught by fewer latent dimensions. By means of simple product moment correlations between the scales, Table 2 displays the result of applying a classical unrestricted Factor Analysis to the Danish data set. As shown in Table 2, the factor structure is not consistent across the two grades. For grade eight

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Table 2 Factor loadings (rotated solution, values exceeding 0.50 are marked) for Danish Data set grade eight and grade nine. Eigenvalues exceeding 1 are listed Variable F1 CTCONMLE CTSOCMLE GOVECMLE GOVSOMLE TRUSTMLE PATRIMLE WOMRTMLE IMMIGMLE CONFSMLE POLATMLE CCLIMMLE CTCONMLE CTSOCMLE GOVECMLE GOVSOMLE TRUSTMLE PATRIMLE WOMRTMLE IMMIGMLE CONFSMLE 0.51* 0.57* 0.47 0.52* 0.41 0.28 0.59* 0.53* 0.57* 0.25 0.50* 0.00 0.15 0.10 0.09 0.40 0.01 0.71* 0.70* 0.47 F2 0.32 0.05 0.51* 0.43 0.42 0.09 0.15 0.09 0.16 0.63* 0.31 0.31 0.54* 0.73* 0.71* 0.16 0.16 0.27 0.14 0.34 F3 0.42 0.12 0.07 0.21 0.10 0.59* 0.40 0.57* 0.05 0.08 0.18 0.73* 0.40 0.04 0.02 0.31 0.03 0.11 0.14 0.03 Factors F4 0.33 0.38 0.23 0.15 0.38 0.54* 0.22 0.09 0.23 0.33 0.27 0.18 0.04 0.02 0.14 0.46 0.84* 0.02 0.31 0.26 F5 grade 8 Eigen values 2.6 1.3 1.2 1.1

grade 9 Eigen Values 2.8 1.3 1.2 1.1

there is a tendency towards one-dimensionality (rst factor takes account of 42% of the total variance), with PATRI outside the structure. A restricted two-factor solution, however, still leaves approximately 45% to be explained by a second factor, which seems to comprise CTCON, TRUST, POLAT and CCLIM. Grade nine offers a clearer interpretation of the factor structure with approximately 32% of the variance explained by the rst factor and an even distribution of around 20% for each of the other factors. Again, PATRI seems to constitute a single dimension (factor 4), while WOMR and IMMIG constitute the most loaded factor 1; the government related issues GOVVEC and GOVSOM dominate factor 2 and, nally, the general concept of conventional citizenship CTCON constitutes factor 3. Factor analyses carried out for all 28 participating countries would produce similar results. There would be a varying number of factors necessary to explain the total variance, and country-specic factor patterns would emerge as latent dimensions. Conclusions based on this kind of analysis of cross-country differences are conclusions which start from a multi-faceted list of factors, their loadings and interpretations. Only further local within-country analyses can offer valid and reasonable interpretations to the factor structure found in a particular country. This procedure cannot be undertaken as means of analysis and interpretation across all 28 countries, and other means of analysis are, therefore necessary.

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6. Measures of distance As the international report (Torney-Purta et al., 2001) displays the mean values by country for the attitude scales, a comprehensive picture of similarities and differences across countries is available for each scale. However, it is not possible with these analyses to produce a composite student prole, i.e., how students simultaneously respond to all 11 scales. Each response prole constitutes a point in an 11th dimensional vector space. Groups of students go together in clusters of points. The total set of students (approximately N 94000 students) form a sphere around the international mean=(10,10,10,y,10) with a standard deviation on the distance to this point of (2,2,y,2) ; these are the international mathematical constraints on the Rasch scores for each of the 11 scales. Location and distance between points in this multidimensional space will be evaluated using various multivariate statistical techniques. A widely used measure of distance among response vectors of higher dimensions is the Mahalanobis Distance (Rao, 1965). This is a measure based on standardized scale values and determined before measures of distance between any two eleven-dimensional points will be calculated. It takes into account both the actual site of a point (or a cluster of points) and the correlation structure of the scales by attributing more length to the distance between two xed points placed in high correlating scales (co-ordinate axes) compared to independent scales. Points with equal distances from the international mean=(10,10,10,y,10) form a rugbylike football.

7. Between-country distances The calculation of between-country distances results in an upper triangle of bilateral distances, where each country can be xed as an anchor. Taking Denmark as one anchor for such distances, the results are presented in Table 3 (Since Denmark is the centre, the rst distance measure is zero). It must be emphasized that Table 3 does not report high or low scores on the 11 scales, and it is therefore not a ranking table of the countries in terms of levels for student responses to the 11 scales. Nor does it reveal anything about statistically signicant deviations between Denmark and the other countries. From Table 3 it can be read, for example, that considering all attitude scales simultaneously, the average response patterns of Danish grade 8 students very closely resemble average response proles from Switzerland, Norway, Australia, Germany and Belgium, quite closely resemble response proles from England, Czech Republic, Sweden, Hungary and Finland, while student proles from Latvia, Portugal, Slovenia, Russia, Lithuania, Chile, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Romania, Poland, Greece and Colombia seem to be rather different. Although it seems that the country means can be clearly distinguished in Table 3, there might be an overlap on the student level. This overlap can to some extent be evaluated using linear discriminant functions. This

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Table 3 Between-country Mahalanobis distances measuring distances between country by means of eleven attitude scales (no pooling of covariance matrices) Abbreviation DNK CHE NOR AUS DEU BFR ENG CZE SWE HUN FIN USA EST ITA SVK HKG LVA PRT SVN RUS LTU CHL BGR CYP ROM POL GRC COL Distance 0.00 0.70 0.73 1.01 1.25 1.40 1.71 1.79 1.79 1.85 1.87 1.95 2.08 2.19 2.21 2.67 3.10 3.25 3.29 3.38 3.39 3.74 3.85 4.05 4.23 4.28 4.50 4.65 Country Denmark Switzerland Norway Australia Germany Belgium England Czech Republic Sweden Hungary Finland United States Estonia Italy Slovak Republic Hong Kong Latvia Portugal Slovenia Russia Lithuania Chile Bulgaria Cyprus Romania Poland Greece Colombia

technique generalizes the idea of drawing a simple straight line somewhere between two groups of points. If the two groups can be separated completely by the straight line, the percentage correct classied points in each of the groups, by means of the line, is 100%. Often the best line leaves points from one group on the wrong side of the line, where the other group points are placed; and a certain overlap emerges. Table 4 displays the result of applying 28 linear discriminant functions to the 28 country groups of response vectors xv = (x1v,y, x11v). It is seen that Denmark as a group is most isolated in the sense of property to be separated from the other countries (by a linear subspace). The degree of isolation is high, too, for COL = Colombia, GRC = Greece and CYP = Cyprus, which ts well with the fact that these countries are among the most distant countries from Denmark, (cf. Table 3, where distances between country means are shown). As another example, Chile differs much from Denmark (3.74, cf. Table 3) but student

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Table 4 Summary of linear discriminant analyses of 28 countries. Pct is the percentage correct classied number of observations in the country by means of linear separators Abbreviation DNK COL GRC CYP FIN DEU HKG ENG LTU SWE POL ROM SVN PRT RUS NOR BFR LVA CHE USA HUN EST BGR ITA CZE SVK AUS CHL Pct 39.61 31.15 31.07 24.43 22.2 21.22 19.74 19.48 19.31 18.96 18.71 17.74 16.02 15.49 14.81 14.69 14.28 11.18 11.04 9.28 8.22 7.69 6.48 6.20 4.82 3.51 3.31 2.48 Country Denmark Colombia Greece Cyprus Finland Germany Hong Kong England Lithuania Sweden Poland Romania Slovenia Portugal Russia Norway Belgium Latvia Switzerland United States Hungary Estonia Bulgaria Italy Czech Republic Slovak Republic Australia Chile

responses cannot clearly be separated from the other countries (2.48% correct classication, cf. Table 4).

8. Within-country distances When dealing with within-country distances, calculations are then restricted to a group of students within a xed country and must be seen in relation to a xed reference point, e.g., the international mean value (10,10,10,y,10). Fig. 1 displays average within-country distances, grouped according to gender. The interpretation of Fig. 1 is simple: The greater the distance, the greater is the deviation from the neutral attitude point (10,10,10,y,10), which by denition is a neutral Rasch score point. However, this does not necessarily mean in the middle between strongly disagree and strongly agree on the underlying Likert response scale! In fact, most students did not select the Strongly disagree answer, and a 10 does not

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16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 A B B C C C C C D D E E F G H H I L L N P P R R S S S U U F G H H O Y Z E N N S I R K U T T V O O R O U V V W S S R R E L L P U U K G T N C G N A U A R L T M S K N E A ALPHA NUMERIC COUNTRY CODE GIRL OR BOY 1 2

Fig. 1. Within-country Mahalanobis Distances calculated for all students in the international data set (pooled covariance matrix) by gender: Girls (1 3 * ) Boys (2 3 K).

mean the same thing when you compare results from one scale to another. A great distance indicates that the response is very heterogeneous, greatly deviating from the neutral point. In Fig. 1 we note several distinct patterns. First, it can be observed that girls systematically respond closer to the neutral point (10,10,10y,10) compared to their male schoolmates, because the curve in Fig. 1 for girls is placed consistently below the curve for boys. In other words girls tend to use the underlying scale of agreement by selecting response categories with less variation across the eleven scales than boys. Another characteristic of Fig. 1 is the rather large general differences across countries. One explanation for this difference in the underlying scale of agreement is based on cultural background. Or perhaps some students may be hesitant to select the scale extremes. The countries with the lowest average student distances are CZE = Czech Republic, EST = Estonia , HKG = Hong Kong, LVA = Latvia, PRT = Portugal, RUS = Russia, and SVK = Slovak Republic. Hong Kong, however, also shows the greatest gender difference. Countries with the greatest distances are BFR = Belgium, BGR = Bulgaria, GRC = Grece, ROM = Romania, SWE = Sweden and USA. Danish students are placed in the middle.

mahala

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9. The general level of correlation among eleven Civic scales Usually, correlation is dened and calculated as a measure of co-variation between two variables. This would lead to 55 pair-wise correlation coefcients for the eleven scales. The resulting matrix containing these values could be calculated for each country and then be compared using various statistical techniques. Overall, this would involve approximately 1500 correlations. Quite often, however, the matrices of correlation are used for factor analysis. A concept of general correlation is still missing. The following calculations are based on the prior analysis with the Mahalanobis Distance. In fact, one way to assess general correlation is to compare average student Mahalanobis Distances under an assumption of independence, with the actual distances calculated under the conditions of actual correlations found in the data. The greater the difference between the Mahalanobis Distances calculated under the two versions, the higher correlation in general must be present among the scale responses. This leads to Fig. 2, where the two distance measures are displayed. The greater the gap between the two curves in Fig. 2, the more correlated are the responses in general to the eleven scales for the particular country on the X-axis. The information in Fig. 2 can furthermore be summarized numerically as ratios between Mahalanobis Distances under correlation to the distance assuming no correlation. Table 5 lists these ratios and, it can be clearly seen that the countries
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mahala

12

11

10 A B B C C C C C D D E E F G H H I L L N P P R R S S S U U F G H H O Y Z E N N S I R K U T T V O O R O U V V W S S R R E L L P U U K G T N C G N A U A R L T M S K N E A

ALPHA NUMERIC COUNTRY CODE

Fig. 2. Average Mahalanobis Distances based on data for each country separately. Upper curve (K) is calculated, cf. (1) assuming that scales correlated. Lower curve (*) is calculated, cf. (2) assuming that scales are independent.

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Table 5 Average Mahalanobis Distances calculated from data from each country Abbreviation Distance Dep. 11.40 11.57 11.58 11.61 11.68 11.68 11.82 11.84 12.02 11.92 12.02 12.10 12.30 12.24 12.46 12.50 12.36 12.53 12.87 13.15 13.34 13.36 13.39 13.57 13.65 13.82 13.89 14.00 Distance Indep. 10.97 10.90 10.90 10.90 10.91 10.85 10.87 10.79 10.93 10.78 10.87 10.68 10.83 10.70 10.78 10.80 10.66 10.79 10.61 10.73 10.75 10.70 10.61 10.72 10.65 10.47 10.44 10.51 Ratio Country

HUN CYP SVK RUS CHL CZE ITA ROM COL GRC POL SVN EST DEU PRT FIN CHE LVA NOR LTU BFR DNK SWE ENG HKG AUS USA BGR

1.04 1.06 1.06 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.10 1.11 1.11 1.13 1.14 1.14 1.16 1.16 1.16 1.16 1.21 1.23 1.24 1.25 1.26 1.27 1.28 1.32 1.33 1.33

Hungary Cyprus Slovak Republic Russia Chile Czech Republic Italy Romania Colombia Greece Poland Slovenia Estonia Germany Portugal Finland Switzerland Latvia Norway Lithuania Belgium Denmark Sweden England Hong Kong Australia United States Bulgaria

Distance dep: eleven scales assumed correlated. Distance indep: eleven scales assumed independent. Ratio: Distance dep/distance indep.

enjoying the greatest reduction are Denmark, Sweden, England, Hong Kong, Australia and Bulgaria. This means that student responses from these countries seem to be highly correlated in general, while students in countries like Czech Republic, Chile, Russia, Slovak Republic, Cyprus and Hungary seem to respond to the 11 scales with a high degree of independence among the scale responses.

10. Predicting levels of civic knowledge As a contrast to the described analyses, the Civic Study offers an immediate possibility to study the correlation structure from the perspective of a regression analysis, where correlations between dependent and independent variables are examined for their ability to predict values of the dependent variables. The following

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analyses consider the eleven scales as independent variables and the Civic knowledge scale as the dependent variable, recognizing that it is not really an integral point for the Civic Study to look at these scales from the perspective of dependent variables to be derived from independent variables. One interesting facet of the regression analysis is its capability to provide comparisons of adjusted knowledge levels instead of comparing the simple, direct average values on the knowledge scales, as listed in the rst international report (Torney-Purta et al., 2001, Fig. 3.3 p. 55 lists total knowledge). In fact, expected (i.e., predicted) levels of Civic Knowledge are calculated and compared, based on a specic student prole xv = (x1v,y, x11v), used for all countries. Table 6 shows the results of this co variance analysis. Listed rst are two kinds of mean values for the knowledge scale: Mean2 being the international (weighted) mean
Table 6 Reported knowledge mean values from the international report Abbreviation AUS BFR BGR CHE CHL COL CYP CZE DEU DNK ENG EST FIN GRC HKG HUN ITA LTU LVA NOR POL PRT ROM RUS SVK SVN SWE USA Mean1 100.41 95.25 100.44 97.52 89.94 89.17 107.91 103.54 100.25 102.45 97.81 94.61 108.73 109.46 110.37 102.26 105.84 95.51 92.90 104.27 112.87 98.05 93.71 102.29 106.89 102.09 98.87 104.11 Mean2 99.35 95.28 99.05 97.14 93.82 88.12 107.48 111.61 98.64 100.54 96.38 94.75 107.66 109.02 107.26 102.76 105.73 94.82 93.81 102.70 110.18 97.53 93.53 102.08 109.71 101.93 97.85 100.55 Adj1 98.00 94.91 104.04 96.29 90.24 89.17 108.33 104.46 99.43 101.40 94.16 95.89 107.09 109.15 110.49 104.39 105.30 98.87 95.53 101.29 111.75 97.86 97.70 103.89 108.18 103.21 97.51 101.60 Adj2 98.12 96.45 103.46 97.05 91.16 89.65 106.68 104.85 99.41 102.09 94.75 96.57 107.02 107.74 113.47 103.74 105.51 97.66 96.12 100.64 111.42 98.11 96.87 103.54 108.49 104.61 97.17 100.30 Country Australia Belgium Bulgaria Switzerland Chile Colombia Cyprus Czech Republic Germany Denmark England Estonia Finland Greece Hong Kong Hungary Italy Lithuania Latvia Norway Poland Portugal Romania Russia Slovak Republic Slovenia Sweden United States

Mean2: Reported knowledge mean values from the international report. Mean1: The same as Mean2, but only students with no missing responses enter the calculations. Adj1 are adjusted knowledge levels using common regression coefcients across all countries, Adj2 are adjusted knowledge levels using regression coefcients estimated from each country.

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values (knowledge of content, only, Type 1), which reect how countries are ranked using the simple average values. Mean1 is the same as Mean2, but only students with non-missing responses to all 11 scales (in fact a total of N = 84000 students) enter the calculations. Adj1 and Adj2 are the adjusted, or predicted, knowledge values estimated from the regression model using the student prole xv = (x1v,y, x11v) = (10,10,10,y,10). Two adjusted values are given, one based on equal regression coefcients equal for all countries (Adj1), the other (Adj2) based on local regression coefcients estimated from specic country data. In the last case, interpretation of differences in (expected) knowledge levels across countries depends heavily on the choice of reference student xv = (x1v,y, x11v). By comparing Mean2 values to either of the columns Adj1 or Adj2, we see that the top ranking based on the international Mean2 values change slightly for Czech Republic and Hong Kong. A position in the middle ranking, like Norway, changes to a slightly lower value, while Romania moves up from a low ranking position to a place near the middle. The lowest position, held by Colombia, remains the same with or without adjustments. In the same way, Poland keeps its position as the top-ranked country. It is tempting to conclude that only minor changes in the rankings take place between unadjusted and adjusted knowledge values. This analysis conrms, to an extent, that the international rankings carried out by Mean2 reect scale-eleven independent information, and that the international rankings are objective in the sense that they change only slightly, when information from the 11 scales is used as a conditional prerequisite for the comparisons. This impression is supported by multiple correlations R2 for the regression, found to be around 13% to 25%. One of the controversies of the displayed co variance adjustment technique is that the xed reference student xv = (x1v,y, x11v) may not be part of any of the countryspecic clusters of responses to the eleven scales, the likelihood of which can, in fact, be judged from Fig. 1, since this gure displays the (student average) Mahalanobis Distance to this reference student. While the adjusted levels of knowledge across countries in many instances were almost the same as the unadjusted values, the analysis of adjusted gender differences reveals a greater change in difference. In fact, considering students in grades eight and nine in Denmark, for example, it can be shown that the original, raw knowledge difference (Mean2 values for boys minus girls): 101.1297.52 = 3.60 (grade eight) and 108.75104.46 = 4.29 (grade nine) became greater when adjusted (Adj1 adjustments, cf. Table 6) according to the eleven scales: 107.4397.40 = 10.03 (grade eight) and 114.53103.51 = 11.02 (grade nine). All differences are signicant, at a 5% level of signicance. It can furthermore be noted that the adjustment procedure has the greatest impact on expected levels for boys.

11. Summary and conclusions The paper presents analyses of complete student attitude proles, considered as simultaneous response vectors holding 11 Civic scales scores. By means of a general

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distance measure developed by Mahalanobis (Rao, 1965) it is demonstrated how participating countries can be arranged and compared using information from all 11 scales simultaneously. Gender differences in response behaviour on the underlying ordinal scale are detected. The general distance measure takes into account scale correlations and facilitates the assessment of a correlation level assigned to the scales, looked upon as one multidimensional response. Finally, the relationship between Civic knowledge and the 11 attitude scales is explored by means of multiple regression analysis and the model is used for predicting expected, or adjusted levels of Civic knowledgeacross countries and across gender. References
Allerup, P. (1994). Rasch measurement theory of. The international encyclopaedia of education (2nd ed.). New York: Pergamon Press. Beaton, Albert, et al. (1996). Mathematics Achievement in the Middle School Years. IEAs third international mathematics and science study. USA: Boston College. demokratiske vrdier I skole og samfund. Bruun, J. (2001). Politisk Dannelseunges synspunkter pa Copenhagen: The Danish Institute for Educational Research. Elley, W. (1992). How in the world do students read. IEA study of reading literacy. The Hague: IEA. Fischer, G., & Molenaar, I. (1995). Rasch modelsfoundations, recent developments, and applications. New York: Springer-Verlag. Rao, C. R. (1965). Linear statistical inference and its applications. New York: Wiley. Rasch, G. (1960). Probabilistic models for some intelligence and attainment tests. Copenhagen: The National Danish Institute for Educational Research. Torney-Purta, J., Lehman, R., Oswald, H., & Schulz, W. (2001). Citizenship and education in twenty-eight countries: civic knowledge and engagement at age fourteen. Amsterdam: IEA.