Do Minority Representative Reading Passages Provide Factorially Invariant Scores for All Students?

Abstract

This study investigated the factorial invariance across students from different ethnic groups of a 7th-grade state reading assessment with a narrative passage selected for its Hispanic representativeness. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the fit of 1-, 2-, and 3-factor models to each of the 5 ethnic groups. After a modified 2-factor model was identified as the best fitting, several levels of constraint were investigated. Invariance across all groups was supported for factor loadings and intercepts. However, invariance of the error variances across the groups was not supported. Although the results support the factorial invariance of the scores based on a minority representative reading passage, further research into group differences for the error variances is needed.