Gender Differential Item Functioning in TEFL Master of Arts University Entrance Exam in Iran: Comparing Logistic Regression and Mantel-Haenszel Procedures

The current study was aimed at exploring Differential Item Functioning (DIF) items in Iranian TEFL MA Entrance Exam employing two beneficial and valuable statistical methods Logistic Regression (LR) and Mantel-Haenszel (MH). Besides, the founded DIF items were gone through a content analysis in order to explore the potential linguistic resources of such biases. To this end, the answer sheets of 2217 female and 735 male examinees in 2015 were analyzed to find items containing DIF. The findings of LR technique determined eight items as DIF containing items. Half of the items were advantageous to the men and the other half of the items favoured women. MH procedure explored eleven items as DIF flagging items. Out of these items, six items favoured male test takers and five items showed tendency toward female test takers. No particular linguistic source for such deviated behaviour of items was proposed through the content analysis of the DIF items.