WHO IS WILLING TO TAKE LOW-STAKES ASSIGNMENTS?

1. Introduction The process of acquiring a higher education in Estonia has been changing over the last two decades. Estonian researchers have written about the possible devaluation of higher education--as higher education has become more obtainable, the number of students in Estonia has almost tripled in the last twenty years (Unt, Taht, Saar, and Helemae 2013). The researchers found that, for many students, a degree in itself has become more important than the quality of the education they acquire. As the main purpose for many students is to pass and get a degree, not to achieve mastery of the subject matter, many education-related tasks are low-stakes for students. Low-stakes tasks are, for example, tests that are rather trivial for students--failure or a bad grade does not result in serious consequences. So, we argue that, for many students in Estonia, the process of acquiring a higher education could be a sequence of taking low-stakes tests. From another point of view, these kinds of tests are the quickest and easiest way for lecturers and professors to evaluate students. Testing is also widely used in low-stakes conditions in which the results of the tests are rather trivial for students. For example the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics or Science Study (TIMSS) use standardized tests to assess the impact of education quality and to understand what causes differences in achievement across nations. The results, while important to governmental institutions, tend not to be particularly significant to students. In order to motivate students not willing to participate in low-stakes testing and voluntary academic work, it is important to know their characteristics (i.e. academic motivation and self-evaluation [self-efficacy, self-esteem]). Furthermore, motivating students to be better in their process of acquiring knowledge would greatly improve the quality of higher education. 2. Previous studies There have been few attempts to distinguish students who are ready to do low-stakes tests and those who are not (Brown and Gaxiola 2010, Eklof 2010, Wise and DeMars 2005). Unfortunately, there are no studies at all investigating how different these students are in terms of psychological indicators. It is natural to investigate candidates for psychological indicators related to the willingness to take low-stakes tests from the set of psychological factors known to be related to students' academic achievement. So far, research (Deci and Ryan 2000, Marsh and Hau 2003, Rosenberg et al. 1995) has shown positive relationships between academic achievement, academic motivation, and self-evaluation, but the relationships between self-beliefs and the willingness to takes low-stakes tests have not been investigated. Therefore, the main purpose of the current study is to explore whether students' willingness to take low-stakes tests is related to their self-evaluation and academic motivation. Besides self-evaluation and academic motivation, previous academic results could play an important role in students' decision whether to take low-stakes tests or not, so we are interested in how previous academic results influence this decision. As there are reported gender differences in the case of low-stakes testing (Eklof 2007; Schnipke 1995; Wise, Kingsbury, Thomason, and Kong, 2004)), our purpose is to investigate if there are gender differences in the willingness to take low-stakes tests and if are there differences in low-stakes tests results. 2.1. Motivation to learn and test-taking motivation In the broad sense, motivation is defined as "to be moved to do something" (Deci and Ryan 1985). One can think about motivation as a unitary construct. It means that motivation (to act) can vary from a little to a great deal. There are quite many motivation theories, but one of the widely used approaches is to divide motivation into intrinsic and extrinsic. …