The impact of students' test-taking effort on growth estimates in low-stakes educational assessments

This study investigated the impact of students' test-taking effort on their growth estimates in reading. The sample consisted of 7,602 students (Grades 1 to 4) in the United States who participated in the fall and spring administrations of a computer-based reading assessment. First, a new response dataset was created by flagging both rapid-guessing and slow-responding behaviours and recoding these non-effortful responses as missing. Second, students' academic growth (i.e., daily increase in ability levels) from fall to spring was calculated based on their original responses and responses in the new dataset excluding non-effortful responses. The results indicated that students' growth estimates changed significantly after recoding non-effortful responses as missing. Also, the difference in the growth estimates varied depending on the grade level. Overall, students' test-taking effort appeared to be influential in the estimation of students' reading growth. Implications for practice were discussed.