Kate Cammack, CfT Co-Director
“One of the best ways to be bad at something is to tell yourself that you are bad at it.”
The idea that some people are simple “bad test-takers” is ubiquitous in popular academic lexicon and in the media (Reddit threads provide one of many cringy examples).
But it’s tricky to define what a “bad test-taker” actually is.
Presumably, it’s someone that understands the academic material and has effective study skills, but who consistently does not “show what they know” on tests. But why might this be?
Holmes (2021) suspected that students who attributed their test performance to a trait-like factor somehow inherent to themselves, rather than their grasp of the material or effectiveness of their study habits, would be more likely to consider themselves a bad test-taker. In this way, he wrote, a bad test-taker identity is a form of low self-efficacy, or the belief that you have the ability to succeed; indeed, “self-efficacy for a task promotes avoidance, low perseverance, and negative emotionality in the face of that task (Bandura, 1997)”.
This explanation related to explanatory style, or consistent ways that people explain negative events in their lives (Peterson & Barrett 1987). Briefly, Peterson and Barrett (1987) found that people who attribute negative events to internal factors that are unlikely to change over time (i.e., a personal “trait” or characteristic) are more passive and less effective problem solvers than people who attribute negative events to external (non-personal) factors. Further, college freshman who make such internal attributions for their academic struggles had lower GPAs (despite similar SAT scores), greater symptoms of depression (and this study was in 1987!), and were less likely to seek assistance from their academic advisor. Follow-up studies found that students making internal attributions believed that failures were out of their control and were more likely to give up (McKean 1994) – indicators of a fixed mindset.
Holmes’s goals were to assess the prevalence of bad test-taker identity among college students and identify factors associated with a bad test-taker identity.
What he did:
- Recruited 311 undergrad participants at a liberal arts college (83% women), who were relatively evenly distributed across freshman to senior years
- Gave them a series of established scales that measured:
- test anxiety, or students’ various anxious reactions to tests & testing situations (Benson & El-Zahhar 1994)
- academic self-efficacy, or students’ confidence in their academic abilities (Chemers et al., 2001)
- academic entitlement, or the “expectation that one should receive certain academic outcomes (e.g., high grades)…often independent of performance” (Kopp et al., 2011)
- need for cognition, or the “tendency to ‘engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive endeavors’ (Cacioppo et al., 1984)”
- study strategies and motives, or the use of deeper or more superficial strategies and motives used to study (Biggs et al., 2001)
- academic beliefs & attitudes, or responses to questions such as “Some people are bad test-takers even when they know course material well”
Findings regarding the prevalence of bad test-taker identity:
- Over 90% students agreed that some people are bad test-takers even when they knew the course material well; over half (55%) agreed “strongly” with this.
- Over half (56%) of the students reported that they see themselves as bad test-takers.
- Over one-third (35%) reported that someone else had told them that they are a bad test-taker.
- Over two-thirds (65%) reported that they are “smart enough that they should not struggle in their classes.
- Most students (70%) agreed that standardized tests primarily assessed test-taking ability, rather than content knowledge.
He also found that students who saw themselves as bad test-takers:
- had lower confidence in their academic abilities,
- expended less effort on cognitive activities,
- possessed more surface-level learning motives and utilized more superficial study strategies,
- felt more entitled to positive academic outcomes (e.g., grades) regardless of performance, and
- showed higher levels of test anxiety
compared to students who don’t see themselves as bad test-takers.
How this might inform your teaching:
- Try a simple intervention. In one study, asking students to write briefly about a positive experience prior to a quiz reduce test anxiety, improve quiz performance, and consider the quiz as a challenge rather than a threat (Nelson & Knight, 2010)
- Help students think about their learning. Students don’t often know how to make sense of their learning experiences. Consider talking explicitly with them about what makes courses hard (or easy) or how to make sense of the feedback that you give them – it will be time well spent.
- Explore an expanded set of assessment approaches. There are many ways to assess students’ learning without relying exclusively on traditional quizzes or exams (e.g., here). For instance, are there alternate ways to assess students’ learning, or to revisit your balance of low- versus high-stakes quizzes/exams in your course?
- Take a colleague to coffee. A casual chat with another educator about things we’re trying, challenged by, and curious about? Sounds amazing! In fact, some deeply meaningful ideas and moments can arise when we co-create knowledge and engage in mutual care. Take a minute to email someone in another department, building, discipline and invite them to connect over something we all love to do – teach.
We hope to expand our conversations on assessment practices over the coming year – including different ways to grade (e.g., the unessay), whether grading is “broken,” how to get students to use feedback in helpful ways, how we might rethink grading in the context of GenAI, and how to shift our assessment practices to be kinder and even joyful (!) Stay tuned for more.