Doctoral defence: Gerli Silm “Test-taking motivation in low-stakes and high-stakes testing contexts”

On 6 September at 10:00 Gerli Silm will defend her doctoral thesis “Test-taking motivation in low-stakes and high-stakes testing contexts”.

Supervisors:
Professor Margus Pedaste, University of Tartu
Associate Professor emeritus Olev Must, University of Tartu
Associate Professor Karin Täht, University of Tartu

Opponent:
Associate Professor Hanna Eklöf, Umeå University (Sweden)

Summary
In the fields of education and psychology, tests are used to measure people's knowledge and skills. However, the results of such tests are often not personally relevant to the test-takers, although these may be relevant on other levels – for example, test results may be used to compare students or groups of students across schools and countries. Previous studies have shown that results on low-stakes tests, that do not have significant consequences for test-takers, are lower compared to results in high-stakes tests. Validity theory also suggests that different factors contributing to construct irrelevant variance, including motivation, should be considered when interpreting test results. As test-taking motivation (TTM) is mainly seen in the framework of expectation-value theory, it can be inferred that the motivation to complete a test can also manifest itself in a situation that is generally considered to be high-stakes. Therefore, it is important to assess TTM. Mainly self-report questionnaires have been used for this, but as answers to these may not always be sufficiently objective, alternative methods for assessing test-taking motivation have been proposed such as Response Time Effort (RTE, Wise and Kong, 2005). RTE gives an indication of the amount of effort used in the test based on test-taking times. In this doctoral dissertation, it was investigated how the effort to complete the test manifests itself in both low-stakes and high-stakes testing contexts. Test-taking effort was assessed with a self-report questionnaire and time-based measures of effort, including RTE. Test-taking effort was related to test performance in both low-stakes and high-stakes testing contexts, although test-taking effort explained a larger part of the variance in the low-stakes test. It was reasoned that self-reported effort and RTE describe different parts of the motivation spectrum, and that both can provide valuable information about test-taking motivation.