Skip to main content

New Research by Turner College Economist Examines Test-Taking Strategies and Outcomes in Business Education

In their new study on test-wiseness strategies in business and economic education, Turner College economist Frank Mixon and his co-author Steven Caudill of Florida Atlantic University point out that the use of large lecture halls in business and economic education often dictates the use of multiple-choice exams to measure student learning.  Their study, which appears in the latest issue of Stats, asserts that student performance on these types of exams can be viewed as the result of the process of elimination of incorrect answers rather than the selection of the correct answer.  More specifically, how students respond on a multiple-choice test can be broken down into the fractions of exam questions where no wrong answers can be eliminated (i.e., random guessing), one wrong answer can be eliminated, two wrong answers can be eliminated, and, eventually, all wrong answers can be eliminated.  The data for the study come from student performance on a final exam in a principles of microeconomics course.  These consist of 94 exam grades over each of 100 questions.  The final exam consisted of multiple-choice questions, with four answer choices offered for each question.  The empirical model is a mixture of binomials in which the probability of a correct choice depends on the number of incorrect choices eliminated.  Thus, for each of the 100 questions on the exam, students can eliminate zero, one, two, or three incorrect answers.  Eliminating zero incorrect answers is considered random guessing and eliminating three incorrect questions results in a correct response.  Between these two extremes is what Mixon and Caudill refer to as “informed guessing,” where one or two incorrect answers have been eliminated.  The results indicate that the responses to about 26 percent of the questions on the exam can be characterized as random guessing.  Additionally, about 12 percent of the questions were answered with one incorrect choice eliminated, while about 61 percent of the questions were answered as if two incorrect choices had been eliminated.  Finally, none of the questions on the exam was completed after eliminating all of the incorrect choices.  Stats is an international, peer-reviewed journal on statistical science.  The journal focuses on methodological and theoretical papers in statistics, probability, stochastic processes and innovative applications of statistics in all scientific disciplines including biological and biomedical sciences, medicine, business, economics and social sciences, physics, data science and engineering.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Four Turner College Faculty Recognized for Outstanding Teaching

CSU Head Women's Soccer Coach Jay Entlich recently released a list of CSU faculty who have been chosen by a player as a member of the CSU faculty who has impacted the player in a positive way along their journey at CSU. Four Turner College faculty were included on the list, along with the player who nominated each. Management professor Phil Bryant was named by Sophia Leal , a freshman midfielder from Oxford, Georgia. Sophia attended Eastside High School and was a two-time all-region selection during her high school career. Through the first 10 games of 2024, she has scored one goal and recorded three assists.         Next, management professor John Finley was named by Lizz Forshaw , a graduate student forward from Stockton, England. Lizz, who attended IMG Academy in south Florida, has scored four goals and recorded four assists this season. During her senior year in 2023, she scored three goals and recorded two assists. As a junior in 2022, Lizz scored three goals ...

Seven Turner College Management and Marketing Faculty Have Combined to Produce Eight A-Level Journal Publications Between 2021 and the Present

A number of faculty in the Turner College's Department of Management and Marketing, which includes faculty in management information systems, have produced A-level journal publications in the last few years. This report covers that activity, starting with John Finley , the chairperson of the department. Professor Finley published a paper in the Journal of Computer Information Systems in 2022.      Finley is joined by Kirk Heriot , the Crowley Distinguished Chair in Entrepreneurship. Heriot, who earned a PhD in management from Clemson University, published in a 2021 issue of Small Business Economics . One of the study's co-authors, Andres Jauregui of Fresno State University, was previously a member of the Turner College's economics faculty.      Next is Johnny Ho , a professor of management, who has a 2022 publication in the Journal of Computer Information Systems . Ho has won CSU's Excellence in Research Award on multiple occasions, while he has compiled 2...

TSYS School, Jianhua Yang, Lixin Wang Each among Top Five in the World

New research by computer scientists in the School of Information Technology at Universiti Utara Malaysia that ranks institutions and individuals on the basis of scholarship in the area of stepping-stone attacks heaps praise on the Turner College’s TSYS School of Computer Science and two of its faculty – Jianhua Yang and Lixin Wang .   The article, published in the April 2023 issue of the International Journal of Research in Engineering and Science , provides a bibliometric analysis of both publication and citation data from 2000 to September of 2022 related to research on stepping-stone intrusion.   Among several results, it reports that Columbus State University ranks second worldwide, trailing only the University of Houston, using total publications on the subject as the basis of comparison.   A number of other U.S. institutions appear in the top 10, including third-ranked North Carolina State University, fourth-ranked University of Illinois, sixth-ranked Iowa State U...