Response to "An Examination of Plausible Score Correlation from the Trend in Mathematics and Science Study"

Abstract

This article is a response to an article written by Wang and Ma "An Examination of Plausible Score Correlation from the Trend in Mathematics and Science Study", published in the Athens Journal of Education. The purpose of this paper is to address issues with Wang’s and Ma’s suggestion to use analysis method for correlating plausible values from TIMSS. The paper reviews the design of international large-scale assessments, and TIMSS in particular, and its implications for data analysis in regard to the application of Canonical Correlation Analysis for calculating association between two sets of plausible values, as proposed by Wang and Ma. The conclusion is that, given the design of TIMSS and other large-scale assessments, the method proposed by Wang and Ma is not appropriate for correlating two sets of plausible values because they are not multivariate measures as the suggested method would assume. Some other methodological issues related to the overall analysis approach used by Wang and Ma is discussed as well

Keywords

• correlation
• international large-scale assessments
• methodology
• multiple imputation
• plausible values