Research Question 3

Background

We're very interested in what students use their extended time to *do*. When a student with a disability takes additional time to finish working on a test, what do they do with the time? One way of answering this question is to look at how students who use extra time apportion their total time spent on the test, and then look at how students without disabilities apportion their time. For instance, what if students with disabilities who use extra time spend 20% of their total time checking their work, whereas nondisabled students spend only 5% of their total time checking their work? This would suggest that some of the extra time is being devoted to checking work. A related technique would look at these proportions for individual test items, since items vary quite a bit in their characteristics, and time apportionment will likely vary based on those item characteristics. Some items have more text to read, some items require students to just click an answer choice, whereas other items require students to write out an answer and explain it, etc.

Method

Based on the work of other researchers, we considered four phases of time use that we believe that we can identify for most of the test items that we are analyzing:

1. Planning/processing Phase - This phase starts as soon as a student enters a test item, and continues until the student engages in a recorded action that shows an attempt to start responding to the item. This could be selecting an answer option, or starting to type a response, or even eliminating an incorrect option.

2. Execution Phase - This phase involves actively responding to an item through selection or completion of an answer.

3. Review Phase - In this phase, the student has selected or completed a response, but has stayed in the item, presumably to review their work. They may even change their answer.

4. Checking Phase - In this phase, the student has left the item and now returned to it, presumably to check their work. Any time spent in the item after leaving it once would count toward the checking phase.

We are working on related analyses and will update with results when they are available.