A Dystopian Picture of Critical Thinking Assessment: Within this video, I describe two dystopian conditions within educational assessment with specific attention given to critical thinking assessment. Specifically, I suggest that realizing the promise of authentic assessment requires us to examine the effect of assignments as a source of error.
All pictures are used for educational purposes only.
All pictures are used for educational purposes only.
Motivational Filtering: A Comparison of a Test-Specific and Global Measure of Student Effort.
This presentation provides information about motivational filtering as a technique to control for student effort in low-stakes testing. Most research has filtered student responses according to their reported effort across a battery of examinations or their "general" effort. Motivation theory, as well as some prior research, suggests that there may be advantages to filtering student responses according to their "test-specific" effort as opposed to their generalized effort across a series of examination. Within this study we investigate the potential advantages of filtering according to test-specific effort as opposed general effort. Findings indicated that test-specific effort may account for unique variance over and above general effort and proxies for student ability. However, this failed to translate into anything that may be judged to have practical value (e.g. differences in proportions of students meeting faculty standards). There is currently insufficient evidence to suggest that assessment practitioners should abandon general measures of student effort in favor of measure of test-specific effort when using motivational filtering to control for motivation as a source of invalidity in low-stakes testing.
This study was presented at the 2014 annual conference of the Northeastern Educational Research Association.
This presentation provides information about motivational filtering as a technique to control for student effort in low-stakes testing. Most research has filtered student responses according to their reported effort across a battery of examinations or their "general" effort. Motivation theory, as well as some prior research, suggests that there may be advantages to filtering student responses according to their "test-specific" effort as opposed to their generalized effort across a series of examination. Within this study we investigate the potential advantages of filtering according to test-specific effort as opposed general effort. Findings indicated that test-specific effort may account for unique variance over and above general effort and proxies for student ability. However, this failed to translate into anything that may be judged to have practical value (e.g. differences in proportions of students meeting faculty standards). There is currently insufficient evidence to suggest that assessment practitioners should abandon general measures of student effort in favor of measure of test-specific effort when using motivational filtering to control for motivation as a source of invalidity in low-stakes testing.
This study was presented at the 2014 annual conference of the Northeastern Educational Research Association.
Student Affairs Assessment Video Series: As part of my work at JMU, I coordinate a team of individuals who strive to enhance the assessment capacity of student affairs professionals. This is accomplished via direct consultation, educational activities, and the dissemination of professional work related to student affairs assessment. We created a short series of videos to provide training to student affairs practitioners who are interested in using assessment data to enhance student learning and/or development.