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Author: Trivitt, Julie
Resulting in 2 citations.
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Hitt, Collin Trivitt, Julie |
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Don’t Know? Or Don’t Care? Predicting Educational Attainment Using Survey Item Response Rates and Coding Speed Tests as Measures of Conscientiousness EDRE Working Paper No. 2013-05, University of Arkansas, August 2013. Also: http://www.uaedreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Hitt_Trivitt_EDRE_2013_05.pdf Cohort(s): NLSY97 Publisher: Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas Keyword(s): Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB); Educational Attainment; Noncognitive Skills; Nonresponse; Personality/Big Five Factor Model or Traits Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Leading research shows the importance of non-cognitive skills for educational attainment, but advances in this research have been slowed by a common data limitation: most datasets do not contain explicit measures of non-cognitive skills. We examine a new proxy for non-cognitive skills, survey item response rates. Using a detailed national survey of American adolescents, we find that the percentage of questions left unanswered is a significant predictor of educational attainment. The fewer questions left unanswered, the higher the likelihood overall that respondents will enroll in college. We replicate our analysis using a more rudimentary dataset, of the kind typically used in program evaluations, and again find that item response rates are predictive of educational attainment. We posit that survey item response rates capture conscientiousness, a personality trait that is not explicitly measured in most surveys. Thus item response rates provide a convenient measure of non-cognitive skills. We also examine another proxy for non-cognitive skills, results on a coding speed test. Coding speed is also predictive of educational attainment, independent of cognitive ability. Our results suggest coding speed also captures conscientiousness, albeit different facets of conscientiousness than item response rates. We conclude that coding speed and item response rates can both be used to measure the impact of public policy on important non-cognitive skills. |
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Bibliography Citation
Hitt, Collin and Julie Trivitt. "Don’t Know? Or Don’t Care? Predicting Educational Attainment Using Survey Item Response Rates and Coding Speed Tests as Measures of Conscientiousness." EDRE Working Paper No. 2013-05, University of Arkansas, August 2013. |
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Hitt, Collin Trivitt, Julie Cheng, Albert |
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When You Say Nothing at All: The Predictive Power of Student Effort on Surveys Economics of Education Review 52 (June 2016): 105-119. Also: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775716300541 Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97 Publisher: Elsevier Keyword(s): Educational Attainment; Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS:2002); High School and Beyond (HSB); National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS); National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (AddHealth); Noncognitive Skills; Nonresponse Character traits and noncognitive skills are important for human capital development and long-run life outcomes. Research in economics and psychology now shows this convincingly. But research into the exact determinants of noncognitive skills has been slowed by a common data limitation: most large-scale datasets do not contain adequate measures of noncognitive skills. This is particularly problematic in education policy evaluation. We demonstrate that within any survey dataset, there is important latent information that can be used as a proxy measure of noncognitive skills. Specifically, we examine the amount of conscientious effort that students exhibit on surveys, as measured by their item response rates. We use six nationally-representative, longitudinal surveys of American youth. We find that the percentage of questions skipped during the baseline year when respondents were adolescents is a significant predictor of later-life educational attainment, net of cognitive ability. Insofar as item response rates affect employment and income, they do so through their effect on education attainment. The pattern of findings gives compelling reasons to view item response rates as a promising behavioral measure of noncognitive skills for use in future research. We posit that response rates are a measure of conscientiousness, though additional research is required to determine what exact noncognitive skills are being captured by item response rates. |
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Bibliography Citation
Hitt, Collin, Julie Trivitt and Albert Cheng. "When You Say Nothing at All: The Predictive Power of Student Effort on Surveys." Economics of Education Review 52 (June 2016): 105-119.
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