Prospects for reducing group mean differences on cognitive tests via item selection strategies.
研究通过删除不同比例的高难度或高群体差异题目，检验能否减少认知测试中的种族/民族群体均值差异，发现题目删减只能适度缩小差异，无法消除。
Cognitive ability tests are widely used in employee selection contexts, but large race and ethnic subgroup mean differences in test scores represent a major drawback to their use. We examine the potential for an item-level procedure to reduce these test score mean differences. In three data sets, differing proportions of cognitive ability test items with higher levels of difficulty or subgroup mean differences were removed from the tests. The reliabilities of these trimmed tests were then corrected back to the lengths of the original tests, and the subgroup mean differences of the trimmed tests were compared to those of the original tests. Results indicate that it is not possible to come anywhere close to eliminating subgroup differences via item trimming. The procedure may modestly reduce subgroup mean differences in test scores, with effects becoming stronger as higher proportions of items are removed from the tests. Removing items based on difficulty or subgroup differences have roughly similar impacts on test score mean differences for Black-White test taker comparisons, but results are more mixed for Hispanic-White comparisons. Our results also provide preliminary evidence that removing items on the basis of subgroup mean differences may have relatively little effect on test criterion-related validity, but the impact of removing difficult items was more mixed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).