Identifying Patterns of Disengagement in a Low-Stakes Assessment

When responding to a low-stakes assessment, students may not provide effortful responses due to the lack of personal consequences which threatens the validity of interpretations of assessment results. To mitigate this threat, it is critical to identify patterns among disengaged students. Understanding these patterns provides insight into the behavioral dynamics of disengaged students and can be useful for interventions aimed at promoting student engagement. By investigating disengaged students at the test-level, we classified them into two newly proposed classifications: accelerated responders and non-accelerated responders. Accelerated responders reach an item such that they begin to proportionally rapidly guess more often for all subsequent items, whereas non-accelerated responders do not respond with this pattern. We found accelerated responders constitute a large majority of students disengaged at the test level. These findings explain the extent to which students disengage in a low-stakes assessment and may inform intervention strategies aimed at mitigating non-effortful responding.