Two Approaches to Examinee Motivating Filtering 1 Examinee Motivation in Low-Stakes Testing: Two Approaches to Identifying Data from Low- Motivated Students in an Applied Assessment Context

Many universities rely on data gathered from tests that are low stakes for examinees but high stakes for the various programs being assessed. Given the lack of consequences associated with many collegiate assessments, the construct-irrelevant variance introduced by unmotivated students is a major potential threat to the validity of the inferences that institutions can make from their assessments. Two approaches to evaluating examinee motivation are discussed in this paper: one that employs a global paper-and-pencil self-report measure of students ’ motivation on all tests completed during the course of a testing session, and another computer-based method that non-intrusively measures the amount of time students spend on each item in a test. This study provides evidence that the two motivation filtering methods provide similar aggregate test scores; however, more data was removed using the global paper-and-pencil self-report technique