Student, School, and Country Differences in Sustained Test-Taking Effort in the 2009 PISA Reading Assessment

Dries Debeer, Janine Buchholz, Johannes Hartig and Rianne Janssen
Additional contact information
Dries Debeer: University of Leuven
Johannes Hartig: German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF)
Rianne Janssen: University of Leuven

Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 2014, vol. 39, issue 6, 502-523

Abstract: In this article, the change in examinee effort during an assessment, which we will refer to as persistence, is modeled as an effect of item position. A multilevel extension is proposed to analyze hierarchically structured data and decompose the individual differences in persistence. Data from the 2009 Program of International Student Achievement (PISA) reading assessment from N = 467,819 students from 65 countries are analyzed with the proposed model, and the results are compared across countries. A decrease in examinee effort during the PISA reading assessment was found consistently across countries, with individual differences within and between schools. Both the decrease and the individual differences are more pronounced in lower performing countries. Within schools, persistence is slightly negatively correlated with reading ability; but at the school level, this correlation is positive in most countries. The results of our analyses indicate that it is important to model and control examinee effort in low-stakes assessments.

Keywords: examinee effort; testing; item response theory; PISA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/1076998614558485 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jedbes:v:39:y:2014:i:6:p:502-523

DOI: 10.3102/1076998614558485

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().