Intellectual achievement responsibility. A many-facet Rasch model analysis of the scale by Crandall, Katkovsky and Crandall

The present study consists in the analysis of the responses of 485 high school Italian students to the items of the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility questionnaire (IAR – Crandall, Katkovsky & Crandall, 1965) in view of the definition of a new form of the scale. The Italian version by Nigro and Galli (1988) is applied to the participants. The data are analyzed by means of the Many-Facet Rasch Model (MFRM – Linacre, 1989) approach. Within the frame of Rasch analyses, the MFRM allows the parameterization of complex measurement situations in which different aspects might interfere between the ability of the person and the difficulty of the item, such as specific social, educational or clinical attributes which characterize the persons, or different occasions in which the items are administered to the persons, or different methods applied to administered the items, or when different judges are used to evaluate the test performances, and so on. In this study the MFRM allows the definition of a psychometrically valid form of the IAR scale which consists of 30 items, fifteen for the I+ score and fifteen for the I- score. Such items are not only well calibrated on the continuum of the latent trait characteristic of the intellectual achievement responsibility, but the items are also free from biases such as those derived from the interaction with gender, type of school attended by the students, school grade and parental cultural level.