Student Test-Taking Effort and the Assessment of Student Growth in Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness

Abstract

There is evidence that student effort has significant influence on growth results, and that unusually low levels of student effort may have a significant impact on student growth within a classroom or among students assigned to a teacher.This paper discusses problems related to test validity when students do not exhibit full effort on assessments, overview methods for detecting non-effortful test taking, and describe methods for ameliorating the problems. In addition, the results of the data analyses derived from this study will illustrate both the problems and our proposed solutions. This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) in April, 2013.