publisher
Student engagement and performance in online assessments: evidence of ceiling effects and implications for adaptive assessment design
- Source
- Frontiers in Education
- Published
- Last verified
- 12 Aug 2026
- Confidence
- High
- Evidence
- Original document retained
- Reading time
- 1 min
- Country
- International
- Relevant to
- Research & Evidence, Risk & Compliance, Technology & Data
Executive summary
What happened, and why should leadership care?
A study by Frontiers in Education identified a significant ceiling effect in online assessments among female computer science undergraduates at King Khalid University, where a majority achieved perfect scores. This effect obscured the relationship between engagement and performance when using traditional statistical methods. However, cluster analysis revealed four distinct engagement-performance profiles, suggesting that despite high scores, varied underlying engagement levels exist.
Why this matters
Why is this strategically important?
The presence of ceiling effects in online assessments can lead to inaccurate evaluations of student performance and engagement, making it difficult to identify at-risk students or tailor interventions effectively. Addressing this issue is critical for developing more robust and diagnostically useful assessment tools that provide a clearer picture of learning outcomes and engagement dynamics.
Key insights
What should be noted from the evidence?
- Online assessments exhibit ceiling effects, with over half of students achieving perfect scores, making it difficult to differentiate performance.
- Traditional correlation, regression, and classification analyses failed to show a significant relationship between behavioral engagement and performance due to score compression.
- Cluster analysis, which is less dependent on score variance, identified four distinct engagement-performance profiles.
- One identified profile included students with high effort but low performance, which was not apparent with traditional analysis.
- The study involved 242 female undergraduate computer science students at King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia.
Evidence and confidence
How far can this assessment be trusted?
High confidence. Named institution, original document retained and analysis corroborated.
Analysis is prepared editorially by Aziz Shuaib Ausi. The original publication remains the authoritative record, and executive judgement remains entirely human.
Source
Where does this originate?
Reported by Frontiers in Education · International. This briefing summarises the publication for executive use; the document itself is not reproduced here.
Read the original publication