Global perspectives on the impact of situational factors on student testing

Abstract

The current regular issue contains several articles specifically looking into the testing situation for students across the globe, with empirical studies from New Zealand, Spain, Israel, and England. While some of the articles look at students ́ specific situation and how they are accommodated to do their best in their testing situation, other articles look at how the different stakes of a test influence students’ effort and motivation. In the first article in this issue, Zhao et al. (2022) examines students’ conceptions of tests and test-taking motivation using an experimental design including a sample of 497 students from senior secondary education in New Zealand. Students were assigned to one of three different test conditions (none, country or self) and responded to self-reports about their motivation and anxiety depending upon the different conditions. It might not come as a surprise that students ́ efforts were notably lower when the country was at stake versus the self-at-stake conditions. The question raised by the authors is whether New Zealand’s rankings in international large-scale assessments are valid. These discussions are not new, and more empirical studies are needed to investigate how students’ motivation might vary across the globe, and under different conditions, particularly as similar empirical studies in Scandinavia have demonstrated high effort from students during international tests (Eklöf & Hopfenbeck, 2019; Hopfenbeck & Kjærnsli, 2016). The second article by De La Fuente Fernández and Pascual (2022) investigates the current influence of university entrance exams on the teaching of chemistry in upper secondary education in Spain. A total of 447 chemistry teachers responded to a survey, demonstrating that the content taught in schools is closer to what is required to pass the university entrance exam, than to what the teachers themselves believed was important for students to learn. In other words, a clear washback effect of these admission tests was found. In addition, it found significant differences between regions with respect to curriculum taught, findings which are discussed in relation to future directions and possibilities. Saka et al. (2022) has assessed differential prediction and differential validity in higher education admission policy for students who have a variety of disabilities. More specifically, they investigated students who were either granted or denied test accommodations on the Israeli Psychometric Entrance Test (PET). The sample comprised 124,501 records of first year students from six universities and more than 2000 academic departments. The results demonstrated that the accommodation policy was generally fair towards students with disabilities, but the authors also found that the failure of applicants to provide adequate documentation of their disability could result in technical rejection, which could in turn lead to the under-prediction of their academic performance. A similar approach was taken by Rodeiro & Macinska (2022) in their investigation of the claim that students with test accommodations are given an unfair advantage rather ASSESSMENT IN EDUCATION: PRINCIPLES, POLICY & PRACTICE 2022, VOL. 29, NO. 4, 395–396 https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2022.2130242