Several studies have been published on disengaged test respondents, and others have analyzed disengaged survey respondents separately. For many large-scale assessments, students answer questionnaire and test items in succession. This study examines the percentage of students who continuously engage in disengaged responding behaviors across…

In large-scale low-stake assessment such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), students may skip items (missingness) which are within their ability to complete. The detection and taking care of these noneffortful responses, as a measure of test-taking motivation, is an important issue in modern psychometric models.…

This study aims to first investigate the effect of the extreme response style (ERS) which could lead to an attitude-achievement paradox among the countries participating in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS 2015), and then to determine the individual- and country-level relationships between attitude and achievement…

In the literature, response style is one of the factors causing an achievement-attitude paradox and threatens the validity of the results obtained from studies. In this regard, the aim of this study is two-fold. Firstly, it attempts to determine which item response tree (IRTree) models based on the generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) approach…

This study investigates consistent and inconsistent respondents to mixed-worded questionnaire scales in large-scale assessments. Mixed-worded scales contain both positively and negatively worded items and are universally applied in different survey and content areas. Due to the changing wording, these scales require a more careful reading and…

Multiple-choice items are used in large-scale assessments of mathematical achievement for secondary students in many countries. Research findings can be implemented to improve the quality of the items and hence increase the amount of information gathered about student learning from each item. One way to achieve this is to create items for which…

Acquiescence response bias is the tendency to agree to questionnaires irrespective of item content or direction, and is problematic for both researchers and clinicians. Further research is warranted to clarify factors relating to the confounding influence of acquiescence. Building on previous research that investigated the interaction between…

In this study, we investigated how empirical indicators of test-taking engagement can be defined, empirically validated, and used to describe group differences in the context of the Programme of International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC). The approach was to distinguish between disengaged and engaged response behavior by means of…

The outcomes of surveys of "the student experience" that are sector-wide, such as the National Student Survey in the UK and the Course Experience Questionnaire in Australia, are of considerable significance for intending students and institutions. Whilst they may satisfy psychometric criteria, some aspects of their design have been…

Historically, responses to the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) were required to be collected by self-administered paper or online questionnaire to be eligible for official analysis. CEQ responses collected by telephone were excluded from the final analysis file to minimise the potential for bias due to mode effects: systematic variation in…

It has often been suggested that actual or anticipated final grades may influence the ratings given by students in student experience surveys but few studies have been able to test this using actual grades. A study was carried out involving six courses over all four year levels of an undergraduate engineering programme, where students were asked…

Student evaluation surveys provide instructors with feedback regarding development opportunities and they form the basis of promotion and tenure decisions. Student evaluations have been extensively studied, but one dimension hitherto neglected is the actual measurement aspect: which questions to ask, how to ask them, and what answer options to…

In May 2008, the National Assessment Program--Literary and Numeracy (NAPLAN) conducted nation-wide tests for reading, writing, language conventions, and numeracy. A national assessment program of this kind should provide the stimulus for macro-level (systemic) analytical studies and micro-level (individual school and/or class) analytical studies…

The line-bisection task, adapted to utilise a wooden rod as the bisection stimulus, has revealed that patients with visuo-spatial neglect may be more accurate at bisection when asked to pick up the rod, compared to pointing to its centre. We recently reported that neurologically intact participants show a similar dissociation on this…

When 1,201 males and 1,145 females responded to a range of spatial questions, males significantly outperformed females on 25 of 72 occasions. On no occasion did females significantly outperform males. Wattanawaha's system for classifying spatial tasks was used to identify qualitative differences in performances of males and females. (Author/CM)