Guest Editor's Note Donna L. Sundre (bio) Higher education faculty, staff, and administrators are increasingly being challenged to meet new demands in accountability, accreditation, and assessment. The assessment of student learning and development across the general education areas is one of the most demanding tasks that assessment practitioners are mandated to conduct. Not only are the domains to be assessed broad in scope and the instruments designed to measure them few and difficult to properly align with home institution curricula, we also have an additional complexity that most have recognized but few have systematically addressed: the lack of motivation students bring to assessment tasks. General education assessment tests appear to inspire less motivation in students than assessment tasks in the major. This special issue of the Journal of General Education provides an important, and unfortunately rare, opportunity to explore in depth issues associated with examinee motivation. While examinee motivation is widely recognized as one of the most persistent and pervasive problems in education, accountability, and assessment, the literature on the topic is neither broad nor deep with insightful research into the nature of the problem or how to directly address or alleviate it. This special issue was specifically designed to assist in filling this void. For those unfamiliar with assessment practice, an understanding of the very different student orientations and attitudes that students bring with them to assessment testing sessions will prove helpful in forming appropriate interpretations of the assessment results and how administrators and policy makers should also attend to the psychology of examinees. Examinee motivation represents a serious problem in a variety of settings. Low motivation to perform well on tests is particularly manifest when the examination results hold no personal consequences for the students we ask to complete the tasks. College students are particularly adept at understanding when tests count and when they do not. While the test results may contribute to [End Page vii] important considerations, and perhaps high-stakes decisions, about program quality, many students may not put forth good effort. If a meaningful subset of students do not put forth good effort, the result is inevitably an underestimate of true student ability. This systematic error represents bias in measurement. Questions will arise about the nature and impact of low student motivation to perform well on our assessment tasks—such as "How do we know if students are trying?" or "Which students are trying and which ones are not?" or "What can we do to improve student motivation?" or "How much does low motivation negatively impact our results?" or perhaps, "Why should we pay attention to these assessment results when we suspect that many students are not seriously engaged?" Fortunately, the articles in this special issue are directed toward answering such questions. As with all complex real-world problems, there are many remaining research questions, but the four articles included here will provide a solid framework, tools, and methodologies for institutions to meaningfully explore their own assessment settings and examinee motivation. The research reported in this Journal of General Education special issue largely emanates from James Madison University (JMU), where assessment practice has been under way for over twenty years. JMU faculty members and administrators continually asked piercing questions about the validity of interpretations when students were required to participate in the assessment activities but the level of performance had no personal consequences. In other words, the lack of student motivation to perform well threatened the validity of every score interpretation. Due to the data collection strategies employed by JMU via its biannual Assessment Days, systematic research on general education learning outcomes and examinee motivation could be conducted with large, representative samples of students. This research has spanned fifteen years, and many of the highlights of the examinee motivation work are featured in this special issue. The first article by Thelk, Sundre, Horst, and Finney introduces the Student Opinion Scale (sos), an instrument designed to measure examinee motivation. The instrument is freely available, and the article provides the theoretical framework upon which the sos was designed, its psychometric characteristics, and over ten years of validity findings. This essay will provide the seeds for what we hope will be considerable research on other campuses. The...