Preferred Name
Kate
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6322-5018
Date of Graduation
5-14-2026
Semester of Graduation
Spring
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Department of Graduate Psychology
First Advisor
Sara Finney
Abstract
Low-stakes assessments are central to higher education accountability, yet variation in student effort (especially in remote, unproctored settings where test timing is self-selected) threatens their interpretive value. Prior research has examined time of testing and assessment order separately, but less is known about their joint relation to effort or students’ test-time decisions. A convergent mixed methods design was used in a university-wide assessment context. In Study 1, quantitative data were used to examine relations among time of testing, assessment order, personal characteristics, and effort. Effort declined later in the testing window, with steeper declines when the assessment was taken second, even after accounting for personal characteristics. In Study 2, qualitative responses were analyzed to explore students’ explanations for their test-time selection and how these explanations varied across times of day. Students frequently described planning, competing obligations, or the required nature of testing when explaining their decisions. Themes varied across times of day, with students who described intentional planning testing earlier than those without a plan or those facing external constraints, and many students across themes citing Assessment Day and canceled classes as shaping their timing choices. Integrating the two studies clarified how test-time selection varied across the day as a function of planning and situational constraints, indicating that interpreting effort data alongside student reflections yielded a more complete understanding of lower effort observed at later testing times.
