Reducing adverse impact in high-stakes testing

Alexander P. Burgoyne, Cody A. Mashburn and Randall W. Engle

Intelligence, 2021, vol. 87, issue C

Abstract: A critical goal for psychological science in the 21st century is to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion in occupational contexts. One arena which will continue to benefit from a focus on equity is high-stakes testing, such as the assessments used for personnel selection and classification decisions. We define an equitable test as one that minimizes group differences based on protected classes such as race, sex, and ethnicity, while predicting criterion performance equivalently across groups. In this article, we provide an overview of the concepts of test equity, adverse impact, and predictive bias. We discuss how group differences in performance on high-stakes tests such as the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) could be driven by differences in crystallized intelligence (i.e., acquired knowledge), which is emphasized by the ASVAB subtests and related to socioeconomic status. We suggest that shifting the focus of some high-stakes assessments away from crystallized intelligence or supplementing them with other cognitive constructs could mitigate group differences in performance without sacrificing criterion validity. In particular, we provide evidence that tests of attention control—the domain-general ability to maintain focus on task-relevant information and resist distraction—could provide a more equitable path forward.

Keywords: Adverse impact; High-stakes tests; Equity; Attention control; ASVAB; Personnel selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289621000453
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:intell:v:87:y:2021:i:c:s0160289621000453

DOI: 10.1016/j.intell.2021.101561

Access Statistics for this article

Intelligence is currently edited by R.J. Haier

More articles in Intelligence from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().