Beyond Rapid Guessing: Evaluating Test Engagement With Successful and Unsuccessful Time Management Through Process Data in TIMSS 2019

Response times serve as reliable measures of engagement that are less prone to self-report biases. By utilizing response times, we examined the indicators of Successful Time Management (STM) and Unsuccessful Time Management (UTM) across the 36 countries and benchmarking participants in eTIMSS 2019 and investigated their effects on mathematics achievement through a multilevel analysis. The results showed that students use their time differentially based on item correctness, reflecting the need to include item correctness in the analyses when timing data are examined. Overall, higher-performing students exhibited higher levels of STM and lower levels of UTM, indicating they efficiently managed their time on items they answered correctly and invested relatively more time on challenging items. Conversely, lower-performing students tended to have lower STM and higher UTM, suggesting difficulties or disengagement with challenging items. However, significant differences across countries and benchmarking participants were identified, with the United States and Abu Dhabi being among the outliers. These findings provide insights into how students allocate their time during assessments, and important implications for interpreting student performance are discussed.