How False Assurance Affects Test Taking Preformance

Overview

Objectives/Goals Our question is: How does false assurance affect test taking performance? We wanted to find out if when a student was told they did poorly on a test they would alter their answers on the retake to receive a different score. Methods/Materials First, a class had 5 minutes to complete a 16 question test that we constructed from practice standardized tests such as the SAT. When finished, we collected the tests and told them we would grade them. After what they thought was us grading the tests, we falsely told the test group they had a harder version of the test so they did poorly. The control group heard this but was given no information about their test. We told them they all would retake the test. They were falsely under the impression that they had different tests, however, the tests were the same. After comparing the two test scores we recorded the data in our data table. We repeated the same process for the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. Results Our results showed that all of the eighth grade students in the test group changed their answers and half in the control group. Similar results were shown in sixth grade. Our hypothesis was consistent with our data for sixth and eighth grade. However, 7th grade's data was not consistent with our hypothesis. In total an average of 77% of the students in the test group changed their answers and only 53% of the control group changed their answers. Conclusions/Discussion We created a basic experiment that could be easily branched off of to determine data for specific aspects of research. With further research test administrators could determine how what they say affects how the student performs on the test. This could lead to more accurate testing and student mindset to improve test scores.

Competition history

• CSEF 2018 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry J0416

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• CSEF Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2018 project