The Influence of Student Disengagement on a Non-Cognitive Measure: Practical Solutions for Assessment Practitioners

Katarina E. Schaefer & Sara J. Finney   |    Volume 20 Issue 1  |   

Some college students may be disengaged when completing assessments for institutional accountability and improvement. If disengagement is not identified and the resulting data are removed, the validity of score interpretations suffers. Using data gathered from students who completed non-consequential assessments for institutional accountability, we investigated disengagement on a non-cognitive assessment. We demonstrate how we identified students who rapidly responded to items, who “streamlined” answers across items, or who self-reported low effort. We hypothesized that some students would display at least one of these disengagement behaviors and that removing their data would result in scores that better aligned with the assessment’s theoretical factor structure. Half the students who self-reported low effort and half the students who streamlined also rapidly responded. The theoretical two-factor structure of the non-cognitive assessment better represented scores after removing disengaged students. We discuss the practicality of selecting a motivation filtering technique to provide more accurate outcome assessment interpretations.

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