Context effects on examinations: The effects of time, item order and item difficulty.

Tested the effects of contextual factors, i.e., time, item, chapter, and difficulty arrangement, on test performance. In Exp 1, an advantage for students writing a quiz in the early and middle testing periods was found for an afternoon group; however, early testing, compared to middle and late testing, was a disadvantage for an evening group writing the same quiz. Exp 2 found that neither chapter retrieval cues nor sequenced chapter content order affected exam performance; exam items forward-sequenced with text coverage yielded no advantage over those items that were reverse- or random-sequenced. Exp 3 manipulated both chapter order and within-chapter item order so that exam items in any chapter were not sequenced in the same order as text coverage. There was no advantage to receiving exam questions in one sequence over another. In Exp 4, item arrangement was manipulated according to difficulty level (easy-to-hard, hard-to-easy, and random order). No effect on performance for order of item difficulty was found. Results indicate that contextual factors like time have an effect on overall performance; however, other factors, such as item, chapter and difficulty arrangements, have little or no effect on overall performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)