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…

Self-report inventories are commonly administered to measure social and emotional learning competencies related to college readiness. If students respond inattentively or dishonestly, validity will suffer. This study applies several methods of detecting insufficient effort responding (IER) to data from ACT® Engage®. Different methods indicated…

The impact of response styles such as extreme response style (ERS) on trait estimation has long been a matter of concern to researchers and practitioners. This simulation study investigated three methods that have been proposed for the correction of trait estimates for ERS effects: (a) mixed Rasch models, (b) multidimensional item response models,…

The statistical analysis of answer changes (ACs) has uncovered multiple testing irregularities on large-scale assessments and is now routinely performed at testing organizations. However, AC data has an uncertainty caused by technological or human factors. Therefore, existing statistics (e.g., number of wrong-to-right ACs) used to detect examinees…

Large-scale surveys typically exhibit data structures characterized by rich mutual dependencies between surveyed variables and individual-specific skip patterns. Despite high efforts in fieldwork and questionnaire design, missing values inevitably occur. One approach for handling missing values is to provide multiply imputed data sets, thus…

Theories of study time allocation and of curiosity suggest that people are most engaged with and want to devote their time to materials that are not completely mastered but also are not so difficult that they might be impossible. Their curiosity is thought to be triggered by items that are almost known, or are in what is sometimes called theregion…

This study uses the nominal response model to investigate the effects of extreme response styles. The Zung Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) is a commonly used scale for the identification of anxiety disorders. In some cases, the response options are not extreme, ranging from "A little of the time" to "Most of the time;" in other…

Psychologists have become increasingly interested in the intra-individual variability of psychological measures as a meaningful distinguishing characteristic of persons. Assessments of intra-individual variability are frequently based on the repeated administration of self-report rating scale instruments, and extreme response style (ERS) has the…

This report is the first in a series of five reports considering career-readiness features within high school assessments. Utilizing feature analysis and cognitive lab interviews, the primary objective of this study was to verify and validate the existence of specific career-readiness features in select math and English language arts (ELA) test…

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…

We examine the effects of interviewer-respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates of item nonresponse when self-administered questions (SAQs) are used. We use SAQ data from a survey in which the researchers experimentally ensured that there would be varying degrees of familiarity between interviewers and respondents. Our results…

Formative feedback currently receives attention as an effective means of increasing student learning. However, how to frame feedback to achieve the best effect is an ongoing debate. In this study we analyse a written data-set of 174 segments of teacher feedback and student response, coded using 10 emergent feedback and 14 response categories. As…

Problem Statement: The use of self-report questionnaires may lead to biases such as careless responses that distort the research outcomes. Early detection of careless responses in self-report questionnaires may reduce error, but little guidance exists in the literature regarding techniques for detecting such careless or random responses in…

Measuring values in sociological research sometimes involves the use of ranking data. A disadvantage of a ranking assignment is that the order in which the items are presented might influence the choice preferences of respondents regardless of the content being measured. The standard procedure to rule out such effects is to randomize the order of…

Inattentiveness and social desirability might be particularly problematic for self-report scales in creativity and arts research. Respondents who are inattentive or who present themselves favorably will score highly on scales that yield positively skewed distributions and that assess socially valued constructs, such as scales measuring creativity…