NAEP Validity Studies: An Investigation of Why Students do not Respond to Questions

摘要

In this study, we explored potential reasons behind student omission of responses to assessment questions. Understanding why students fail to answer certain questions may help inform the proper treatment of missing data during the estimation of item parameters and achievement distributions.2 It may also help test developers identify strategies for increasing response rates for particular types of questions or for particular groups of students. The study was exploratory, small in scope, and qualitative in nature. The general approach was to visit schools where the 1998 eighth-grade national NAEP assessments in reading and civics were being conducted and interview samples of students about their test taking behaviors and their reasons for not answering particular questions following the assessment sessions. In our interviews we also attempted to determine whether the students could have correctly answered the questions they had left blank. This design was chosen over designs in which the students might take the assessment under more laboratory-like conditions in order to retain the demand characteristics of a typical NAEP assessment. In this way we hoped to obscure as little as possible of the contribution of motivation to NAEP nonresponse.