Abstract
Low stakes assessment without grading the performance of students in educational systems has received increasing attention in recent years. It is used in formative assessments to guide the learning process as well as in large-scales assessments to monitor educational programs. Yet, such assessments suffer from high variation in students’ test-taking effort. We aimed to identify institutional strategies related to serious test-taking behavior in low stakes assessment to provide medical schools with practical recommendations on how test-taking effort might be increased. First, we identified strategies that were already used by medical schools to increase the serious test-taking behavior on the low stakes Berlin Progress Test (BPT). Strategies which could be assigned to self-determination theory of Ryan and Deci were chosen for analysis. We conducted the study at nine medical schools in Germany and Austria with a total of 108,140 observations in an established low stakes assessment. A generalized linear-mixed effects model was used to assess the association between institutional strategies and the odds that students will take the BPT seriously. Overall, two institutional strategies were found to be positively related to more serious test-taking behavior: discussing low test performance with the mentor and consequences for not participating. Giving choice was negatively related to more serious test-taking behavior. At medical schools that presented the BPT as evaluation, this effect was larger in comparison to medical schools that presented the BPT as assessment.
Highlights
Low stakes assessment without grading the performance of students in educational systems has received increasing attention in recent years
Intrinsic motivation occurs if the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are satisfied. We describe those strategies of medical schools to increase serious test-taking behavior that can be explained by self-determination theory (SDT)
One faculty member per medical school who was responsible for the administration of the Berlin Progress Test (BPT) provided data on the employed strategies, which were reconstructed from archives and the memory of the administrators
Summary
Low stakes assessment without grading the performance of students in educational systems has received increasing attention in recent years. Such assessments serve two purposes: first, they are meant to guide the learning process as a formative assessment Extended author information available on the last page of the article. Suffers from high variation in test-taking effort, as students may not be willing to give their best effort to take the test (Wise and DeMars 2010), resulting in less serious test-taking behavior. As a consequence of this high variation, low stakes assessment may not serve these two purposes adequately
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