Investigating Fairness Claims for a General-Purposes Assessment of English Proficiency for the International Workplace: Do Full-Time Employees Have an Unfair Advantage Over Full-Time Students?

The principle of fairness in testing traditionally involves an assertion about the absence of bias, or that measurement should be impartial (i.e., not provide an unfair advantage or disadvantage), across groups of test takers. In more general-purposes language testing, a test taker's background knowledge is not typically considered relevant to the measurement of language proficiency; consequently, if there are systematic differences in background knowledge between groups of test takers this background knowledge should not provide an unfair advantage or disadvantage. As a general-purposes assessment of English for everyday life and the international workplace, the TOEIC® Listening and Reading test is designed to assess the listening and reading comprehension skills of second language (L2) users of English. In this study, we investigated whether a group of test takers with more workplace experience (full-time employees) have an unfair advantage over test takers with less workplace experience (full-time students). We conducted DIF analysis using nine forms of the test (1,800 items) and flagged 18 items (1.0%) for statistical differential functioning. An expert panel reviewed the items and concluded that none of the items could be clearly identified as biased in favor of employed (or student) test takers. Follow-up analyses using score equity assessment found that test scores do not unfairly advantage fulltime employed (versus student) test takers. Finally, we performed a content review using two expert panels that led to examples of how workplace-oriented content is incorporated into test items without disadvantaging full-time students (versus full-time employees). The results of these analyses provide support for claims about the impartiality (or fairness) of TOEIC Listening and Reading test scores for postsecondary test takers and add to current research on the role of background knowledge and fairness for more general-purposes language assessments.