A testing company spots disengaged students who are guessing answers too quickly.

A lack of test engagement can negatively impact scores. Learn about NWEA’s work to prevent and mitigate impacts of rapid guessing.

When students speed through a computer-based test, their responses are far less likely to be accurate than if they took longer to find the solution, according to new research.

Social-emotional learning (SEL) competencies like self-efficacy and conscientiousness can be predictive of long-term academic achievement. But they can also be difficult to measure. In a new study led by NWEA’s James Soland, researchers investigated whether assessment metadata – the way students approach tests and surveys – can provide useful SEL data to schools and educators. Soland joins CPRE research specialist Tesla DuBois to discuss his findings, their implications, and the promise and limitations of student metadata in general.

New research shows that test effort differs substantially across student gender and racial subgroups. What does this mean for achievement gap estimates?

Educators sometimes ask: do students rapidly guess because they don’t know the answer to a question, or do rapid guesses reflect a lack of engagement with the test? Would a student’s scores improve if that student engaged more with the assessment and rapidly guessed on fewer items? Examining MAP® Growth™ test scores and levels of student test engagement for over 100,000 tests for which students retested within one day, the results showed that students’ test taking engagement often differed between the initial test and the retest.

In this study, we introduce those disengagement metrics for a policy and evaluation audience, including how disengagement might bias estimates of educational effectiveness. Analytically, we use data from a state administering a computer-based test to examine the effect of test disengagement on estimates of school contributions to student growth, achievement gaps, and summer learning loss.