Blog article
Design Challenge winner: Student assessment engagement
2017
By: James Soland

Description
In this CASEL Measuring SEL blog, James Soland shares how work with Santa Ana Unified School District led to new insights on how item response times and test metadata may provide insight into student SEL.
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This study examined the utility of response time-based analyses in understanding the behavior of unmotivated test takers. For an adaptive achievement test, patterns of observed rapid-guessing behavior and item response accuracy were compared to the behavior expected under several types of models that have been proposed to represent unmotivated test taking behavior.
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Topics: Measurement & scaling, Innovations in reporting & assessment, School & test engagement


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Whenever the purpose of measurement is to inform an inference about a studentās achievement level, it is important that we be able to trust that the studentās test score accurately reflects what that student knows and can do. Such trust requires the assumption that a studentās test event is not unduly influenced by construct-irrelevant factors that could distort his score. This article examines one such factorātest-taking motivationāthat tends to induce a person-specific, systematic negative bias on test scores.
By: Steven Wise
Topics: Measurement & scaling, Innovations in reporting & assessment, School & test engagement


Modeling student test-taking motivation in the context of an adaptive achievement test
This study examined the utility of response timeābased analyses in understanding the behavior of unmotivated test takers. For the data from an adaptive achievement test, patterns of observed rapidāguessing behavior and item response accuracy were compared to the behavior expected under several types of models that have been proposed to represent unmotivated test taking behavior.
Topics: Innovations in reporting & assessment, Measurement & scaling, School & test engagement