Female Test Takers Research Articles

Keeping Up with the English Proficiency Test: the Vioce of Adult Women Test Takers

A lot of studies reported that female learners' capabilityin mastering second language is better than that in male learners (Lasekan, 2018), and female students tend to be more successful than male students (Hamsinah, 2017). Adult female test-takers experience bigger challenges in dealing with EPT since they are usually multi-roles women i.e. working women, students, wives, and even mothers with babies. The objectives of the study were to analyze the voices of adult women test-takers on the challenges in dealing with English proficiency test related to the most difficult skill that they have to take and how they cope their problems. The study applied mixed method study with descriptive quantitative and phenomenology approach. The data were taken through questionaire and structured interview for 77 respondents of the study. Based on the result of the data analysis on 77 respondents, the questionaire data show that the most difficult part of EPT was listening (58.4%). The respondents provided many strategies for raising their EPT scores. The most popular method of learning EPT was autonomous learning (50.6%), which was followed by taking a course, studying with friends, and not trying to improve EPT at all. These methods received 35.1%, 7.8%, and 6.5 of the total votes, respectively.

The voice of adult women in taking English proficiency test

A lot of studies reported that female learners’ capability in mastering a second language is better than that of male learners. However, adult female test takers experience bigger challenges in dealing with English Proficiency Tests (EPT) since they are usually multi-roles women. The objectives of the study were to analyze the views of adult women test takers on the challenges of English proficiency tests related to the most difficult skill that they have to take and how they cope with their problems. The study applied mixed method study with descriptive quantitative and phenomenology approaches. The data were taken through a questionnaire and structured interview for 77 respondents of the study. Based on the result of the data analysis on 77 respondents, the questionnaire data show that the most difficult part of EPT was listening. The respondents provided many strategies for raising their EPT scores. The most popular method of learning EPT was autonomous learning, which was followed by taking a course, studying with friends, and not trying to improve EPT at all. Keywords: Adult women; coping mechanism; difficult skill; EPT.

Gender differences in leaving questions blank on high-stakes standardized tests

Around the world, multiple-choice tests are widely used as part of high-stakes examinations. To counteract lucky guessing, many of them have instituted a penalty for wrong answers. In this paper, we use administrative data from Turkish college admissions test to study the heterogeneity in gender differences in tendency to leave questions blank across subjects, difficulty levels, and stakes. Exploiting the tracking system and using the resulting variation in the effective guessing penalty across different test sections, we find that female test-takers skip significantly more questions than male test-takers in the quantitative track while we do not find a significant difference in other tracks. Among quantitative track students, the gender gap is larger in Math and when questions are more difficult while it reverses in Literature. We also find that self-assessment is related to skipping behavior and explains part of the gender gap. Male test-takers are more likely than female test-takers to report that they are good at Math, Science, and Social Science after conditioning on their number of correct answers in the corresponding test sections. This gender gap, consistently with the one in skipping behavior, reverses when it comes to Literature. Differently from previous literature, our findings suggest that the magnitude and the sign of the gender gap in answering questions under uncertainty is context dependent.

Results from the test of economic literacy in Germany and Japan: A critical discussion on the gender effect

University lecturers and coordinators of business and economics courses around the world are faced with the challenge that beginning students in these courses have heterogeneous entry conditions in terms of personal characteristics. This article focuses on the economic knowledge of German and Japanese beginning students in a business and economics degree programme. The German and Japanese versions of the US-American Test of Economic Literacy were used for the assessment of the economic knowledge of German ( N = 901) and Japanese ( N = 571) students. The TEL consists of 45 items in two questionnaire versions and is based on 20 globally accepted core standards of economics. The analyses in this paper are based on the total score of all 45 items of the TEL as well as the subscores for the 20 standards. A special focus of this paper is on gender-specific differences in economic knowledge. While gender has a strong effect on economic knowledge in Germany, only a small number of the core standards in Japan exhibit a difference between male and female test takers. The paper concludes by applying interpretative approaches to the different findings in both countries and suggests potential methods for further research on the gender effect in economics education.

Gender fairness in immigration language testing: a study of differential options functioning on the CELPIP-G reading multiple-choice questions

The CELPIP-G test is used by the Canadian federal government to screen immigration eligibility for the skilled worker class. Differential option functioning is a technique used to detect potential bias in the options of multiple-choice items. The purpose of this paper is to investigate DOF in a CELPIP-G reading test form by way of multinomial logistic regression. The results showed that 13.7% of options were flagged as gender DOF. Nonetheless, 11.2% were negligible or small DOF. In the case of uniform gender DOF, twice as many options were found to function against female immigration applicants than against their male counterparts. Female test-takers were more likely to be disadvantaged when tackling questions that asked them to make direct inferences based on factual but unfamiliar information. In contrast, male test-takers were more likely to be disadvantaged when tackling questions that asked them to develop their own interpretations over different views. Moreover, test questions that required an understanding of more sophisticated ideas in complex language structure and allowing personal interpretation tended to show more marked and non-uniform gender DOF.

Performance differences by gender in English reading test

Test fairness becomes an aspect that needs to be considered when developing a test instrument. It is highly recommended that the instrument should not be biased for the test takers, by ensuring that the items do not behave differently among male and female test-takers. This study aims to examine the extent to which the items in an English proficiency test function differently across gender. Fifty reading items were examined and analysed using a statistical method for detecting DIF. The items were individually tested for gender DIF using Rasch model analysis with the analysis tool of ConQuest. The results showed that six items were detected for DIF, three of which were basic comprehension items, and the other three were vocabulary questions. Some possible ways of dealing with DIF items were also discussed.

Using Corpus Analyses to Help Address the DIF Interpretation: Gender Differences in Standardized Writing Assessment.

Addressing differential item functioning (DIF) provides validity evidence to support the interpretation of test scores across groups. Conventional DIF methods flag DIF items statistically, but often fail to consolidate a substantive interpretation. The lack of interpretability of DIF results is particularly pronounced in writing assessment where the matching of test takers’ proficiency levels often relies on external variables and the reported DIF effect is frequently small in magnitude. Using responses to a prompt that showed small gender DIF favoring female test takers, we demonstrate a corpus-based approach that helps address DIF interpretation. To provide linguistic insights into the possible sources of the small DIF effect, this study compared a gender-balanced corpus of 826 writing samples matched by test takers’ performance on the reading and listening components of the test. Four groups of linguistic features that correspond to the rating dimensions, and thus partially represent the writing construct were analyzed. They include (1) sentiment and social cognition, (2) cohesion, (3) syntactic features, and (4) lexical features. After initial screening, 123 linguistic features, all of which were correlated with the writing scores, were retained for gender comparison. Among these selected features, female test takers’ writing samples scored higher on six of them with small effect sizes in the categories of cohesion and syntactic features. Three of the six features were positively correlated with higher writing scores, while the other three were negative. These results are largely consistent with previous findings of gender differences in language use. Additionally, the small differences in the language features of the writing samples (in terms of the small number of features that differ between genders and the small effect size of the observed differences) are consistent with the previous DIF results, both suggesting that the effect of gender differences on the writing scores is likely to be very small. In sum, the corpus-based findings provide linguistic insights into the gender-related language differences and their potential consequences in a testing context. These findings are meaningful for furthering our understanding of the small gender DIF effect identified through statistical analysis, which lends support to the validity of writing scores.

The impact of penalties for wrong answers on the gender gap in test scores

Multiple-choice examinations play a critical role in university admissions across the world. A key question is whether imposing penalties for wrong answers on these examinations deters guessing from women more than men, disadvantaging female test-takers. We consider data from a large-scale, high-stakes policy change that removed penalties for wrong answers on the national college entry examination in Chile. The policy change reduced a large gender gap in questions skipped. It also narrowed gender gaps in performance, primarily among high-performing test-takers, and in the fields of math, social science, and chemistry.

Women's stereotype threat-based performance motivation and prepotent inhibitory ability.

According to the mere effort account of performance, stereotype threat motivates disproval of the negative performance stereotype, which in turn potentiates the overproduction of prepotent responses. In mathematics (maths), prepotent responding facilitates solve type question (e.g., equations) performance, but reduces comparison type question (e.g., estimations) performance. Problematically, the mere effort account indexes performance motivation as task performance. Also, this account posits that performance reduction on non-prepotent tasks derives from the overproduction of prepotent responses, as opposed to failed inhibition of prepotent responses associated with the alternative, namely, the working memory interference perspective. We investigated motivational and prepotent responding as applied to stereotype threat. In Experiment 1, a maths question selection task indexed motivation (independently of performance). Stereotype threat led female test takers to select more solve than comparison maths questions, in accord with the mere effort account. In Experiment 2, higher inhibitory ability protected overall maths performance following stereotype threat, but it did not protect non-prepotentiated comparison question performance (inconsistent with the working memory interference perspective). The results support the mere effort account.

The Impact of Raters’ and Test Takers’ Gender on Oral Proficiency Assessment: A Case of Multifaceted Rasch Analysis

The application of Multifaceted Rasch Measurement (MFRM) in rating test takers’ oral language proficiency has been investigated in some previous studies (e.g., Winke, Gass, & Myford, 2012). However, little research so far has ever documented the effect of test takers’ genders on their oral performances and few studies have investigated the relationship between the impact of raters’ gender on the awarded scores to male and female test takers. Thus, this study aimed to address the above-mentioned issue. Twenty English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers rated the oral performances of 300 test takers. The outcomes demonstrated that test takers’ gender differences did not have any significant role in their performance differences when they were rated by the raters of the same or opposite gender. The findings also reiterated that raters of different genders did not demonstrate bias in rating test takers of the opposite or same gender. Moreover, no significant difference was observed regarding male and female raters’ biases towards the rating scale categories. The outcomes of the study showed that both male and female raters assign fairly similar scores to test takers. This suggests no evidence based on which either male or female raters must be excluded from the rating process. The findings imply that there is no need to worry about the impact of gender for a more valid and reliable assessment.

Stereotype Threat, Inquiring About Test Takers' Race and Gender, and Performance on Low‐Stakes Tests in a Large‐Scale Assessment

This study explores stereotype threat on low‐stakes tests used in a large‐scale assessment, math and reading tests in the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS). Issues identified in laboratory research (though not observed in studies of high‐stakes tests) were assessed: whether inquiring about their race and gender is related to the performance of Black and female test takers and, secondarily, whether this association is greater for test takers most identified with math and reading. After high school sophomores completed a questionnaire that included inquiries about their race and gender, only one change in test performance was consistent with expectations from stereotype‐threat theory: Black test takers' math scores decreased. Their reading scores and young women's math scores did not decrease, and identification with math and reading did not moderate score decreases for Black test takers or women.

Ranking of Causes of Failure to Infer Implicature in TOEFL-like Based on Gender

Inferring implicature or pragmatic meaning from TOEFL-like relies on gender. The present study aims at exploring: 1) types of implicature question that male and female test-takers failed to answer and 2) causes of failure and their rankings. This case study involved six students. Data were collected with tests, retrospective report, inventory of causes of failure, interview, recording and analysed with Mixed Methods. Some causes of failure and one type of implicature questions that male and female test-takers’ failed to answer are different. Males’ ranking is Pronunciation > Sentence Complexity > Cultural Value > Colloquial > Context ≈ Discourse Marker > Mishearing ≈ Speed Rate Delivery ≈ Gender; while females’ ranking is Cultural Value > Pronunciation > Sentence Complexity > Context > Discourse Marker > Colloquial. Based on the levels, the ranking is Male Low > Male Medium > Male High > Female Low > Female Medium ≈ Female High.

Typology of Implicature Questions in TOEFL-Like and Causes of Failure According to Gender

Since women tend to use indirect speech, it is assumed that women face different causes of failure in each type of implicature question when doing Part A Listening Comprehension of TOEFL-like. The present study aims at exploring the: 1) types of implicature question that male test-takers failed to answer and the causes of failure and 2) types of implicature question that female test-takers failed to answer and the causes of failure. This case study involved six students of English Education Program University of Mataram selected based on the result of the preliminary study. Data were collected with tests, retrospective report, inventory of causes of failure, interview, recording and human instrument. Data were analyzed with Mixed Methods: Embeded Design. It shows that types of implicature questions that male and female test-takers’ failed to answer are similar, except Predictable action question. However, some causes of failure to answer certain implicature questions are different. Detailed findings are shown.

The effect of input source (Native vs. Non- native) and EFL learners’ perceptions towards it, on their listening performances, across gender

The issue of the “native/non-native speaker’s input source” occupies an important place in any EFL listening comprehension test. This study is meant to unveil whether listening to a native or non-native speaker (i.e., input source) and students’ perceptions towards it affect the performance of upper-intermediate EFL learners in a listening test. For this purpose, an experimental design was used to compare the performance of two groups of learners on an EFL listening test. A test of 20 multiple choice items was administered to 66 EFL learners (31 male and 35 female), half of whom listened to a native speaker’s voice while the other 33 test takers listened to a non-native speaker’s voice. Moreover, a perception questionnaire considering students’ perceptions towards using native or non-native input source in listening tests was utilized. The results of the study highlighted that the overall performance of the two groups differed significantly. That is, the listeners to the non-native input outperformed those who listened to a native speaker. Also, the results of the questionnaire revealed some noteworthy findings which indicate that students preferred the use of non-native input in listening tests. Moreover, considering gender as a moderator variable, a statistically significant main effect was found for gender; that is, gender does play a significant role as a moderator variable. In other words, female test takers performed better than males in both conditions. Further findings and implications are discussed in the paper.

Gender and Field of Study and Performance on an English Language Proficiency Test

This study reports the performance of five thousand one hundred and eighty three undergraduate and graduate students on a language proficiency test called Ministry of Science, Research and Technology (MSRT). It consists of one hundred traditional multiple choice items selected from the disclosed Test of English as a Foreign Language and measures the listening and reading comprehension abilities as well as structural knowledge. It was taken by students majoring in five branches of knowledge, i.e., agriculture, basic sciences, engineering, humanities and social sciences, and medical sciences, in Iran. The One-Way ANOVA analysis of scores showed that female test takers scored significantly higher than males not only on the MSRT but also on its structure, listening and reading comprehension subtests. The same analysis also showed that engineering test takers scored significantly higher than agriculture, basic sciences and humanities and social sciences on the listening comprehension subtest and MSRT. The scores of engineering and medical science test takers on the reading comprehension subtest were, however, significantly higher than humanities and social science test takers only. The results are discussed and suggestions are made for future research.

Test administrator's gender affects female and male students' self-estimated verbal general knowledge

Effects of test administrator's gender on test takers' self-estimated verbal general knowledge and de facto verbal general knowledge were investigated. Based on three theories previously applied in research dealing with the effects of test administrator's ethnicity, it was expected male and female test takers to show higher scores under female test administration. In a double-blind face-to-face-testing design, 93 university students of both genders in four groups were tested by 20 test administrators of both genders. A MANOVA confirmed the expected significant main effect. Female and male students reached higher scores in self-estimated knowledge when tested by a female test administrator in comparison to female students and male students tested by a male test administrator (Cohen's d = 0.46). No significant effects resulted for de facto knowledge.

Gender differences in the Swedish driving-license test

Introduction Male drivers between 18–24 years are involved in many more motor-vehicle accidents than female drivers in Sweden. Is there also a gender difference in test performance in the Swedish driving-license tests? Is it a real difference or do any of the items display differential item functioning (DIF) with respect to gender or educational background? Method Two random samples of test-takers' performance on the Swedish theory driving-license test were examined with descriptive and inference statistics. Results Female test-takers performed better than male test-takers on the theory test, which is a real difference since no items displayed DIF with respect to gender. There was no gender difference in the practical test. The gender difference in the theory test could not be fully explained by differences in educational background. Conclusions Although everyone who passes the driving-license test has fulfilled the goals stated in the curriculum, it is possible that the gender differences in the theory test are consistent over time, and therefore might be one factor that explains why male drivers are over-represented in traffic accidents. Impact on Industry Gender differences appear persistent over time. Therefore, by improving male test takers' result on the test may lead to positive effects on the male test takers future driving career.

ENSURING THE FAIRNESS OF GRE WRITING PROMPTS: ASSESSING DIFFERENTIAL DIFFICULTY

Three polytomous DIF detection techniques — the Mantel test, logistic regression, and polySTAND — were used to identify GRE® Analytical Writing prompts (“Issue” and “Argument”) that are differentially difficult for (a) female test takers; (b) African American, Asian, and Hispanic test takers; and (c) test takers whose strongest language skills are in a language other than English. Prompts in the gender comparison showed low differential item functioning (DIF) values. Higher DIF values were found in the White versus African American comparison (for Argument prompts), while a smaller number of prompts showed moderate DIF to the disadvantage of the Hispanic (for Argument prompts), Asian American (for Issue prompts), and English as a second language groups (for Issue prompts). No DIF values were found that were large enough to warrant the removal of prompts from the item pool. Several potential causes of high DIF values for some prompts are discussed with respect to the content characteristics of these prompts.

AN INVESTIGATION OF THE IMPACT OF COMPOSITION MEDIUM ON THE QUALITY OF TOEFL WRITING SCORES

ABSTRACTThis study examined scores from 133,906 operationally scored Test of English as a Foreign Language™ (TOEFL®) essays to determine whether the choice of composition medium has any impact on score quality for subgroups of test‐takers. Results of analyses demonstrate that (a) scores assigned to word‐processed essays are slightly more reliable than scores assigned to handwritten essays and exhibit higher correlations with TOEFL multiple‐choice subscores; (b) female test‐takers, examinees whose native language is not based on a Roman/Cyrillic alphabet, and examinees with lower English proficiency are more likely to choose the handwriting medium; (c) the probability of choosing handwriting as the composition medium increases with age for Asian examinees, but decreases with age for most European examinees; and (d) examinees with lower TOEFL multiple‐choice scores tend to have higher handwritten than word‐processed essay scores, while examinees with higher TOEFL multiple‐choice scores tend to have similar scores in either medium.

STEREOTYPE THREAT, THE TEST‐CENTER ENVIRONMENT, AND PERFORMANCE ON THE GRE GENERAL TEST

ABSTRACTThe study investigated the applicability of previous experimental research on stereotype threat to operational Graduate Record Examinations® (GRE®) General Test testing centers. The goal was to document any relationships between features of the testing environment that might cue stereotype threat as well as any impact on GRE test scores among African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and female test‐takers. Among such features were the gender and ethnicity of test proctors and more general factors, such as the size, activity level, and social atmosphere of test centers. Our analyses revealed several relationships among environmental factors and several variations in test performance for all groups. However, we found no direct support for stereotype threat and, in fact, found some effects for proctor ethnicity that ran counter to a stereotype‐threat explanation.