Word: teste
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...study was conducted by psychology professors Phillip Ackerman and Ruth Kanfer of Georgia Tech. They recruited 239 college freshman in the Atlanta area, each of whom agreed to take three different versions of the SAT reasoning test given on three consecutive Saturday mornings. The tests would take three-and-a-half hours, four-and-a-half hours and five-and-a-half-hours, and would be administered in a random order to each of the students. To boost the stress level in the students - who had already taken the SAT in the past and gotten into college - Ackerman and Kanfer...
Before the test began on each of the three Saturdays, the students filled out a questionnaire that asked them about their fatigue level, mood and confidence. They completed the questionnaire again at a break in the middle of the test and once more at the end. Together, all of these provided a sort of fever chart of the students' energy and anxiety throughout the experience...
When the researchers scored the results, it came as no surprise that volunteers' fatigue and stress rose steadily as the test got longer. What was unexpected was their corresponding performance: as the length of the test increased, so did the students' scores. The average score on the three-and-a-half hour test was 1,209 out of 1,600. On the four-and-a-half-hour version it was 1,222; on the five-and-a-half-hour test it was 1,237. Virtually all of the students followed that pattern...
...range of the scores was from about 800 to 1,600," says Ackerman. "[But] within the study, lower-scoring examinees were not more or less affected by longer test lengths than higher-scoring examinees." (See pictures of the college dorm's evolution...
Certainly, the subjects' increasing familiarity with the test may have helped account for the improvement; this is just what happens in the real world, after all, when students take the SAT multiple times in an attempt to boost their scores. But in the real world, the test doesn't keep getting longer; here it did - and yet the scores marched higher all the same. What the researchers believe explains the improvement is fatigue - or more precisely, what the fatigue represents. A feeling of exhaustion is often a stand-in for anxiety. Most students - particularly comparatively high achievers who have already...