From asking to observing. Behavioural measures of socio-emotional and motivational skills in large-scale assessments

Socio-emotional and motivational skills are routinely measured using self-reports in large-scale educational assessments. Measures exploiting test-takers' behaviour during the completion of questionnaires or cognitive tests are increasingly used as alternatives to self-reports in the eco-nomics of education literature. We compute behavioural measures of socio-emotional and motivational skills using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We find that these measures capture important aspects of students' academic profiles: some are importantly associated with contemporaneous performance and educational attainment and most measures have a high degree of stability over time. However, these measures are only limitedly correlated among themselves and have low correlations with self-report measures of the same constructs. This is likely a reflection of the fact that behavioural measures are representations of the test taker current 'state', rather than descriptions of the participant view of their own 'trait' like the self-report measures. Moreover, the low correlation across measures suggests that they capture different behavioural responses to the test-taking situation. These differences are still limitedly understood because the measures are constructed ex-post using collateral information collected during the administration of assessments rather than developed ex ante in line with theoretical models of human cognition and affect.

Automated summary

Socio-emotional and motivational skills are commonly measured using self-reports in educational assessments. However, some studies have started to use behavioral measures as alternatives to self-reports. This study calculates behavioral measures of socio-emotional and motivational skills using data from PISA and finds that they capture important aspects of students' academic profiles. However, these measures have limited correlations with each other and with self-report measures, suggesting that they represent different behavioral responses to the test-taking situation.