Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is an
international assessment that measures the reading literacy of
fourth-grade students (aged 9-10 years old). PIRLS aims to evaluate
and compare the reading abilities of students across different
countries. It assesses how well students can understand and interpret
written texts, which is fundamental to their overall educational
development. In this study, psychometric analyses were run on a
portion of the multiple-choice items of PIRLS 2016 taken by 4th
graders in the USA. The 3PL item response theory model was
utilized to examine the test. Discrimination, difficulty, and guessing
parameters were estimated along with the fit values, reliability, item
characteristic curves, and item-person map. M2, CFI, TLI, and
RMSE statistics showed that the test is reliable and the model,
overall, fits the data. Item fit statistics outfit and infit showed that
most of the items fit the 3PL model. Findings showed that while all
the items have acceptable discrimination values, two items have
unacceptable guessing parameters. Examination of the ICCs
showed that graphical displays are important, in addition to
numerical values, for examining item quality. Item-person map
showed that items do not target the whole ability scale