Many low-stakes assessments, such as international large-scale surveys, are administered during time-limited testing sessions and some test-takers are not able to endorse the last items of the test, resulting in not-reached (NR) items. However, because the test has no consequence for the respondents, these NR items can also stem from quitting the…

The speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) suggests that time constraints reduce response accuracy. Its relevance in observational settings--where response time (RT) may not be constrained but respondent speed may still vary--is unclear. Using 29 data sets containing data from cognitive tasks, we use a flexible method for identification of the SAT (which…

Research has suggested that changing one's answer on multiple-choice examinations is more likely to lead to positive academic outcomes. This study aimed to further understand the relationship between changing answer selections and item attributes, student performance, and time within a population of 158 first-year medical students enrolled in a…

The objective of the present study was to investigate item-, examinee-, and country-level correlates of rapid guessing (RG) in the context of the 2018 PISA science assessment. Analyzing data from 267,148 examinees across 71 countries showed that over 50% of examinees engaged in RG on an average proportion of one in 10 items. Descriptive…

When examinees perceive a test as low stakes, it is logical to assume that some of them will not put out their maximum effort. This condition makes the validity of the test results more complicated. Although many studies have investigated motivational fluctuation across tests during a testing session, only a small number of studies have…

The relationship between latent trait and test-taking speed is an important area of study in assessment research. In addition to contributions of such studies to psychometrics, the factors that affect both ability and speed have implications for test development and have policy consequences especially if the tests are high stakes. This study…

In low-stakes assessments, some students may not reach the end of the test and leave some items unanswered due to various reasons (e.g., lack of test-taking motivation, poor time management, and test speededness). Not-reached items are often treated as incorrect or not-administered in the scoring process. However, when the proportion of…

Background: The idea of using low-stakes assessment results is often mentioned when designing educational system reforms. However, when tests have no consequences for the students, test takers may not make enough effort when completing the test, and their lack of engagement may negatively affect the validity of the conclusions of the studies that…

The use of computer-based assessments makes the collection of detailed data that capture examinees' progress in the tests and time spent on individual actions possible. This article presents a study using process and timing data to aid understanding of an international language assessment and the examinees. Issues regarding test-taking strategies,…

In multiple-choice tests, the quality of distractors may be more important than their number. We therefore examined the joint influence of distractor quality and quantity on test functioning by providing a sample of 5,793 participants with five parallel test sets consisting of items that differed in the number and quality of distractors.…

As computer-based tests become more common, there is a growing wealth of metadata related to examinees' response processes, which include solution strategies, concentration, and operating speed. One common type of metadata is item response time. While response times have been used extensively to improve estimates of achievement, little work…

Recently, Adelman, Marquis, Sabatos-DeVito, and Estes (2013) formulated severe criticisms about approaches based on averaging item response times (RTs) over participants and associated methods for estimating the amount of item variance that models should try to account for. Their main argument was that item effects include stable idiosyncratic…

Response accuracy and response time data can be analyzed with a joint model to measure ability and speed of working, while accounting for relationships between item and person characteristics. In this study, person-fit statistics are proposed for joint models to detect aberrant response accuracy and/or response time patterns. The person-fit tests…

This study focused on the effect of examinees' ability levels on the relationship between Reflective-Impulsive (RI) cognitive style and item response time in computerized adaptive testing (CAT). The total of 56 students majoring in Educational Technology from Shandong Normal University participated in this study, and their RI cognitive styles were…

Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) Operational Study 4 Component 3 was designed to compare performance on PARCC mathematics field-test items for grade 3 taken with and without a drawing tool. For the 2016 testing window, five field-test items were selected to have the directions edited to allow students to…