DOCUMENT RESUME

Problem solving is an important component of education. To make problem solving activities attractive, it is important to confront students with problems of suitable difficulty – neither too easy, nor too difficult. Since students vary in their skills, it is also crucial to make problem recommendations individually adaptive. We present a novel problem response theory, which predicts how much ti...

We conducted a study of 400 preschool children to determine whether spatial and numerical skills rely on common processes. Children completed a battery of mathematical tasks as part of an ongoing preschool formative assessment development project. We created theoretically meaningful skills from these tasks and carried out item response theoretic analyses on each skill. We extracted Rasch scores...

This paper shows the impact of differential discrimination on the results of vertical equating when the Rasch model is applied. It is shown that where there is differential discrimination, relevant items contribute information, for the purpose of vertical equating, that contains systematic error. The impact of differential item discrimination on vertical equating is examined from a theoretical ...

Time spent in leisure is not a minor research question as it is acknowledged as a key aspect of one’s quality of life. The primary aim of this article is to qualify time and Internet use of Italian Generation Y beyond media hype and assumptions. To this aim, we apply a multidimensional extension of Item Response Theory models to the Italian “Multipurpose survey on households: aspects of daily l...

This article highlights the theoretical differences between the Likert and Thurstone approaches to attitude measurement and demonstrates how such differences can lead to discrepant attitude estimates for individuals with the most extreme opinions. Both simulated data and real data on attitude toward abortion are used to demonstrate this discrepancy. The results suggest that attitude researchers...

Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) has been highlighted as a promising assessment method to fulfill two testing purposes: estimating student academic ability and classifying student academic level. In this paper, we introduced the Web-based Adaptive Testing System (WATS) developed to support a cost effective assessment for classifying students’ ability into different academic levels. Instead of us...

It is suggested to insert into test matrix 1s for correct responses, 0s for response refusals, and negative corrective elements for incorrect responses. With the classical test theory approach test scores of examinees and items are calculated traditionally as sums of matrix elements, organized in rows and columns. Correlation coefficients are estimated using correction coefficients. In item res...

We discuss new measures in assessing the skill level of students based on their interactions with the Socratic homework tutor, MasteringPhysics. We show that the measurement of the difficulty of problems for a given student as determined by the time to first correct response, the number of incorrect responses without advice, and hints have high reliability (96%). As an immediate application, we...