Faking Bad: do high-ability elementary students intentionally underachieve when their work is peer-reviewed?
Open Access
- Author:
- Black, Kasey
- Graduate Program:
- School Psychology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 22, 2012
- Committee Members:
- James Clyde Diperna, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Robert Leslie Hale, Committee Member
Eric Loken, Committee Member
Hoi Kin Suen, Committee Member - Keywords:
- underachievement
faking bad
high ability
elementary - Abstract:
- While faking bad, or the intentional distortion of assessment results, has been studied extensively with self-report measures (Lim & Butcher, 1996; Roskes, 2009), the possible presence of this behavior on direct measures has only just begun to be examined. Previous studies of faking bad on academic measures have been limited to students at the middle and high school levels, and results have indicated that students of high ability report faking-bad behavior more often than other students (Boehnke, 2008). These studies also have been limited by their use of nonexperimental designs. Thus, the current study examined faking-bad behavior on direct measures of reading and mathematics achievement in fourth and fifth grade. Students were randomly assigned to a treatment or control condition. In each condition, participants completed brief standardized measures of reading and mathematics. In the experimental condition, participants were informed that their peers would be grading their work after completion of the assessment. In the control condition, participants were informed that their teachers would be the ones to grade their tests. Results indicated that peer review did not adversely affect the reading or mathematics achievement of fourth and fifth grade high-ability students. Moreover, faking-bad behavior did not vary by gender for either subject area. Therefore, intentional underachievement does not appear to occur at the fourth and fifth grade levels in reading or math.