Different Consequences and Contexts Produce different effort on ILSAs

This is a paper that will be presented at the AEA-Europe Conference, Dublin, Ireland, in November, 2022. The work is from Anran Zhao's PhD and was supervised by Gavin Brown and Kane Meissel. The study randomly assigned students to one of 3 test consequence conditions (no stakes, country at stake, personal stakes) after asking them what their conceptions of assessment were. Within each condition, students indicated how important the test was, how hard they would try, and how anxious they would be if the test had the consequence of that condition. We found large differences between NZ and Shanghai 16 year olds who participated in how their test-taking motivation changed as consequence raised. We suggest that high performance on International Large Scale Assessments like PISA may reflect the effort that Shanghai students exercise even when a test is about their country instead of themselves.