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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Quantitative Psychology and Measurement
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1489054
This article is part of the Research Topic Methodological and Statistical Advances in Educational Assessment View all 3 articles

Confidence in Mathematics is Confounded by Responses to Reverse-Coded Items

Provisionally accepted
Faye Antoniou Faye Antoniou 1*Mohammed Alghamdi Mohammed Alghamdi 2
  • 1 National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece
  • 2 King Saud University, Riyadh, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This study investigates the confounding effects of reverse-coded items on the measurement of confidence in mathematics using data from the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The sample came from the Saudi Arabian cohort of 8th graders in 2019 involving 4,515 students. Through mixture modeling, two subgroups responding in similar ways to reverse-coded items were identified representing approximately 9% of the sample. Their response to positively valenced and negatively valenced items showed inconsistency and the observed unexpected response patterns were further verified using Lz*, U3, and the number of Guttman errors person fit indicators. Psychometric analyses on the full sample and the truncated sample after deleting the aberrant responders indicated significant improvements in both internal consistency reliability and factorial validity. It was concluded that reverse-coded items contribute to systematic measurement error that is associated with distorted item level parameters that compromised the scale’s reliability and validity. The study underscores the need for reconsideration of reverse-coded items in survey design, particularly in contexts involving younger populations and low-achieving students.

    Keywords: reverse coded items; aberrant responding, carelessness, Acquiescence, random responding, Person-fit indices, lz*, Guttman errors, U3

    Received: 31 Aug 2024; Accepted: 07 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Antoniou and Alghamdi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Faye Antoniou, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece

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