Thinking about thinking - thinking about measurement: a Rasch analysis of recursive thinking

Two studies were conducted to examine the dimensionality and hierarchical organization of a measure of recursive thinking. In Study 1, Rasch analysis supported the claim that the recursive thinking task measures a single underlying dimension. Item difficulty, however, appeared to be influenced not only by level of embeddedness but also by syntactic features. In Study 2, this hypothesis was tested by adding new items to the recursive thinking measure. Rasch analysis of the modified recursive thinking task produced evidence for the undimensionality and segmentation. However, Study 2 did not support the idea that syntactic features influence item difficulty.