Perceived test importance and test-taking effort are typically measured after test completion, contrary to the temporal ordering specified by expectancy-value theory. Retrospective importance and effort scores may reflect students' self-protective attributions of performance, which would support collection of prospective importance and effort…

Regulatory focus is a strong predictor for a person's behaviour in signal detection tasks. While a promotion focus is related to a risky response strategy (hits, false alarms), a prevention focus is associated with a conservative strategy (correct rejections, misses). The present research is based on the assumption that multiple-choice (MC)…

We investigated how item formats influence test takers' response tendencies under uncertainty. Adult participants solved content-equivalent math items in three formats: multiple-selection multiple-choice, grid with forced-choice (true-false) options, and grid with non-forced-choice options. Participants showed a greater tendency to commit (rather…

Accurate, rational, and scientific decision making is now considered to be the most important skill in science education. Many studies have found that overconfidence bias is one of the cognitive biases hindering people from achieving such decision making. Gender and country play crucial roles in overconfidence bias. For instance, some particular…

Testwiseness is defined as the set of cognitive strategies used by a student that is intended to improve his or her score on a test regardless of the test's subject matter. Questions with elements that may be affected by testwiseness are common in physics assessments, even in those which have been extensively validated and widely used as…

Previous research has found the effects of acquiescence to be generally consistent across item "aggregates" within a single survey (i.e., essential tau-equivalence), but it is unknown whether this phenomenon is consistent at the" individual item" level. This article evaluated the often assumed but inadequately tested…