Date of Graduation

5-2016

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Education Policy (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Education Reform

Advisor/Mentor

Jay P. Greene

Committee Member

Patrick J. Wolf

Second Committee Member

Gema Zamarro

Keywords

Education, Careless answers, Conscientiousness, Item nonresponse, Non-cognitive skills, Personality, Survey methods

Abstract

I propose a new approach to measuring character skills. In the following three essays, my co-‎authors and I measure the effort that adolescent students appear to put forward on surveys ‎and tests. First, I examine the extent to which students simply skip questions or plead ‎ignorance on surveys. Second, I develop new methods for detecting careless answers, those ‎instances in which students appear to be "just filling in the bubbles." I show, using ‎longitudinal datasets, that both measures are predictive of educational degree attainment, ‎independent of measured cognitive ability and other demographic factors. Finally, I ‎demonstrate that international differences in reading, math and science test scores appear in ‎fact to partially reflect international differences in student effort on assessments. Just as some ‎students skip questions and carelessly answer surveys, some students do the same on tests. To ‎the extent that effort on surveys and tests reflects noncognitive skills, presumed international ‎differences in cognitive ability (as measured by standardized tests) might in fact be driven by ‎differences in noncognitive ability. Altogether, the measures explored in the paper present ‎three new methods for quantifying student character skills, which can be used in future ‎research. Throughout, my co-authors and I posit that the character skills that our measures ‎capture are related to conscientiousness and self-control. ‎

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