What research is there (if any), about gifted students frequently getting easy questions on academic tests/exams INCORRECT and harder more challenging ones CORRECT – particularly in mathematics? Does anyone have any empirical evidence as to why this might occur? Thank you.
This response does not directly answer your question however this may be of interest in a wider context of your investigation. There is research that demonstrates that students that are labelled as gifted, are more likely to cheat. Malcolm Gladwell discusses the work of Hartshorne and May in a chapter in 'Tipping Point'
Also see:
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ919395
I am certain that is there related research regarding your question, but I do not follow the literature. I would answer your question with two related themes. First, there is a distinct body of research about how students approach testing and test questions through the lens of Expectancy-Value Theory (EVT). Please note that this is a simplification of Eccles and Wiggins. What is the student's motivation to do well on "X" Test (or test question) given the test-taker's individual ability (perceived), the test's value (to them), the test's utility (to them), and their habit to persist in the task (or not). Following this logic, you would be able to see differences based on the way the student is "wired," given each question's value, utility, and their ability and persistence. I think that there are also close ties to Dweck's work, and Pink's work, as well as Duckworth's work. My second train of thought is from a purely psychometric foundation. On standardized testing measures, questions with a high level of discrimination between master's and non-master's would show that 100% of the master's of the content get X question correct and 100% of the non-master's would get the question wrong. Although this is rare, it is the gold standard of psychometric evaluation. As this sliding scale decreases to the point that it inverts, it would numerically show that student's who mastered the content all chose an incorrect answer, and everyone who was a non-master got the question correct. Following this logic, if what you've asked happens often or consistently, those questions would be culled from the standardized test because they violate the ability to have a highly discriminatory high-stakes test. Please forgive my oversimplification of EVT and Chronbach's Alpha. There are libraries full of related literature to these two bodies of research.
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