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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Contributions of Response Processes Analysis to the Validation of an Assessment of Higher Education Students’ Competence in Business and Economics

subject

description

Higher education domains such as Business and Economics (B&E) generally lack evidence that standardized tests of competency actually assess those aspects of knowledge and reasoning that constitute important targets for learning and instruction. The construction of such a validity argument benefits from a framework to guide the collection of relevant evidence regarding the interpretive meaning of tests results, especially with respect to instruction and learning in B&E. Response processes analysis provides much needed evidence within such a validity argument. The present paper illustrates application of such a framework and the use of response processes analysis for assessment in the B&E higher education domain. It introduces three different mental operations with regard to their construct relevance (elaboration of economic concepts, deductive inferences, and economic heuristics) and examines the outcomes with regard to their relationship to claims about the cognitive, instructional, and inferential aspects of validity for the assessment tasks.