These test formats favor different genders

April 11, 2018
Futurity

When taking standardized tests, girls perform better with open-ended questions, but boys score higher on multiple choice, research shows.

The new study in Educational Researcher shows test format explains about 25 percent of the variation in state- and district-level gender achievement gaps in the United States.

The association appears stronger in English language arts than in math, researchers say, but the differences are not statistically significant.

Test developers and educators will need to attend more carefully to the mix of item types and the multidimensional sets of skills measured by tests, researchers say.

Policymakers, too, will need to be aware of how states’ use of different test formats or emphasis on different skills may influence cross-state comparisons of gender gaps and funding decisions based on those results.

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Mentioned Publications

Prior research suggests that males outperform females, on average, on multiple-choice items compared to their relative performance on constructed-response items. This paper characterizes the extent to which gender achievement gaps on state accountability tests across the United States are associated with those tests’ item formats. Using roughly eight million fourth and eighth grade students’ scores on state assessments, we estimate state- and district-level math and reading male-female achievement gaps. We find that the estimated gaps are strongly associated with the proportions of the test scores based on multiple-choice and constructed-response questions on state accountability tests, even when controlling for gender achievement gaps as measured by the NAEP or NWEA MAP assessments, which have the same item format across states. We find that test item format explains approximately 25 percent of the variation in gender achievement gaps among states.

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