New research shows that test effort differs substantially across student gender and racial subgroups. What does this mean for achievement gap estimates?

In partnership with Santa Ana Unified School District, we explore the impact of chronic absenteeism on student achievement over two years and whether missing 10% of days is too late to take action.

In this study, we introduce those disengagement metrics for a policy and evaluation audience, including how disengagement might bias estimates of educational effectiveness. Analytically, we use data from a state administering a computer-based test to examine the effect of test disengagement on estimates of school contributions to student growth, achievement gaps, and summer learning loss.

Educators sometimes ask: do students rapidly guess because they don’t know the answer to a question, or do rapid guesses reflect a lack of engagement with the test? Would a student’s scores improve if that student engaged more with the assessment and rapidly guessed on fewer items? Examining MAP® Growth™ test scores and levels of student test engagement for over 100,000 tests for which students retested within one day, the results showed that students’ test taking engagement often differed between the initial test and the retest.

Student performance on standardized tests reflects more than just mastery of the material.

Although several common threshold methods are based on rapid guessing response accuracy or visual inspection of response time distributions, this paper describes a new information-based approach to setting thresholds that does not share the limitations of other methods.

Disengaged test taking tends to be most prevalent with low-stakes tests. This has led to questions about the validity of aggregated scores from large-scale international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS, as previous research has found a meaningful correlation between the mean engagement and mean performance of countries.