Cognitive Assessment Models with Few Assumptions, and Connections with Nonparametric IRT

نویسندگان

  • Brian Junker
  • Klaas Sijtsma
چکیده

In recent years, as cognitive theories of learning and instruction have become richer, and computational methods to support assessment have become more powerful, there has been increasing pressure to make assessments truly criterion referenced, that is, to “report” on student achievement relative to theory-driven lists of examinee skills, beliefs and other cognitive features needed to perform tasks in a particular assessment domain. Cognitive assessment models must generally deal with a more complex goal than linearly ordering examinees, or partially ordering them in a low-dimensional Euclidean space, which is what item response theory (IRT) has been designed and optimized to do. In this paper we consider some usability and interpretability issues for single-strategy cognitive assessment models that posit a stochastic conjunctive relationship between a set of cognitive attributes to be assessed, and performance on particular items or tasks in the assessment. The attributes are coded as present or absent in each examinee, and the tasks are coded as performed correctly or incorrectly. The models we consider make few assumptions about the relationship between latent attributes and task performance beyond a simple conjunctive structure: all attributes relevant to task performance must be present to maximize probability of correct performance of the task. We show by example that these models can be sensitive to cognitive attributes even in data that was designed to be well-fit by the Rasch model, and we consider several stochastic ordering and monotonicity properties that enhance the interpretability of the models. We also identify some simple data summaries that are informative about the presence or absence of cognitive attributes, when the full computational power needed to estimate the models is not available. Cognitive Assessment and NPIRT 1

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تاریخ انتشار 2001