The Student and The Test

 Different factors impact students' performance during a test. Although the main factor is how prepared they are, prior beliefs play a significant role in determining their score. A recent series of studies was performed to understand a non-standard behavior of female students in an admission test to a program that develops skills in STEM (Jóvenes a programar). Women participating in that test left more blank answers than men, even when no negative points were assigned to wrong answers. To the extent that wrong answers do not generate a grade discount, the attitude of "not-trying" may be considered as a "non-rational" one.

This gender difference in behavior towards "guessing" an unknown answer is documented in the literature through several experiments that highlight the gender bias in favor of female "non-response" particularly in STEM tests. Saygin and Atwater (2021) documented a gender gap in blank answers in a Turkish college admission test in Math and found a relation with the self-assessment of the participants' math capabilities. Iriberry and Rey-Biel (2021) tudied gender differences in "willingness-to-guess" and found that female participants left significantly more omitted questions than men when no penalty was imposed, emphasizing the importance of "gender-neutral" scoring rules. Coffman and Klinowski (2020) found that removing penalties for wrong answers in a multiple-option university admission test in Chile narrowed gender gaps in performance in different fields, including math.

To reduce the gender gap, three theories about the willingness to leave blank answers were tested. On one side, the behavior may be related to self-efficacy, which involves the participants' thoughts about their ability to solve the task. A second theory tested involved gender stereotypes, as many women hold the feeling that STEM is not a feminine thing. Finally, a third line of work was built around anxiety during the test.

To gather evidence backing these theories, three interventions were prototyped and tested on Prolific Academics. In relation to self-efficacy, inspired in Huang, Mayer, & Usher (2020), test-takers were guided through a sample exercise with feedback directed to inspire self-efficacy thoughts at the beginning of the test. For the intervention on gender stereotypes, participants were presented with stories about women succeeding in the STEM field (Shin, Levy, & London, 2016). Finally, for the anxiety intervention test-takers were asked to perform exercises based on reappraising physiological arousal (Harris et al., 2019) and invited to do some breathing exercises. No conclusive evidence was obtained from this pilot apart from the fact that all three interventions could be operationalized.

Building on this work a field experiment was performed with a focus on the anxiety intervention. In this case, the experiment had enough power and showed that the proposed intervention was successful in reducing the gender gap in blank answers and in general in test results.

Tests are stressful, and success in them depends on many things besides knowledge and willingness. A good test architecture is needed to build fair ways to screen and develop healthy academic tracks.

 

References

Coffman, K. B., & Klinowski, D. (2020). The impact of penalties for wrong answers on the gender gap in test scores. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(16), 8794–8803. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1920945117

Harris, R. B., Grunspan, D. Z., Pelch, M. A., Fernandes, G., Ramirez, G., & Freeman, S. (2019). Can Test Anxiety Interventions Alleviate a Gender Gap in an Undergraduate STEM Course? CBE—Life Sciences Education, 18(3), ar35. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.18-05-0083

Huang, X., Mayer, R. E., & Usher, E. L. (2020). Better together: Effects of four self-efficacy-building strategies on online statistical learning. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 63, 101924. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101924

Iriberri, N., & Rey-Biel, P. (2021). Brave boys and play-it-safe girls: Gender differences in willingness to guess in a large scale natural field experiment. European Economic Review, 131, 103603. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2020.103603

Saygin, P. O., & Atwater, A. (2021). Gender differences in leaving questions blank on high-stakes standardized tests. Economics of Education Review, 84, 102162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2021.102162

Shin, J. E. L., Levy, S. R., & London, B. (2016). Effects of role model exposure on STEM and non-STEM student engagement. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 46(7), 410–427. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12371