Cognitively Diagnostic Assessment

by Nichols, Paul D.; Chipman, Susan F.; Brennan, Robert L.; Conference on Alternative Diagnostic Assessment

• ISBN13: 9780805815894
• ISBN10: 0805815899
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-03-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

During the past two or three decades, research in cognitive science and psychology has yielded an improved understanding of the fundamental psychological nature of knowledge and cognitive skills that psychological testing attempts to measure. These theories have reached sufficient maturity, making it reasonable to look upon them to provide a sound theoretical foundation for assessment, particulary for the content of assessments. This fact, combined with much discontentedness over current testing practices, has inspired efforts to bring testing and cognitive theory together to create a new theoretical framework for psychological testing -- a framework developed for diagnosing learners' differences rather than for ranking learners based on their differences. This volume presents some initial accomplishments in the effort to bring testing and cognitive theory together. Contributors originate from both of the relevant research communities -- cognitive research and psychometric theory. Some represent collaborations between representatives of the two communities; others are efforts to reach out in the direction of the other community. Taking fundamentally different forms, psychometric test theory assumes that knowledge can be represented in terms of one or at most a few dimensions, whereas modern cognitive theory typically represents knowledge in networks -- either networks of conceptual relationships or the transition networks of production systems. Cognitively diagnostic assessment is a new enterprise and it is evident that many challenging problems remain to be addressed. Still, it is already possible to develop highly productive interactions between assessment and instruction in both automated tutoring systems and more conventional classrooms. The editors hope that the chapters presented here show how the reform of assessment can take a rigorous path.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction	p. 1
Student Modeling in the ACT Programming Tutor	p. 19
Probability-Based Inference in Cognitive Diagnosis	p. 43
Diagnostic Assessment of Troubleshooting Skill in an Intelligent Tutoring System	p. 73
A Measurement Model for a Complex Cognitive Skill	p. 103
ASPM2: Progress Toward the Analysis of Symbolic Parameter Models	p. 127
A Bayesian Approach to Cognitive Assessment	p. 141
Assessing Design Activity in Complex CMOS Circuit Design	p. 167
Adapting Cognitive Methods to Real-World Objectives: An Application to Job Knowledge Testing	p. 189
Similarity, Structure, and Knowledge: A Representational Approach to Assessment	p. 221
Cognitive Structure Testing: A Computer System for Diagnosis of Expert-Novice Differences	p. 251
Inferring Students' Cognitive Structures and Their Development Using the "Fill-in-the-Structure" (FITS) Technique	p. 279
Using Clustering Methods to Explore the Structure of Diagnostic Tests	p. 305
Architecture of Knowledge Structures and Cognitive Diagnosis: A Statistical Pattern Recognition and Classification Approach	p. 327
Unified Cognitive/Psychometric Diagnostic Assessment Likelihood-Based Classification Techniques	p. 361
A Cognitive Diagnosis Method Using Latent Trait Models: Competency Space Approach and Its Relationship With DiBello and Stout's Unified Cognitive-Psychometric Diagnosis Model	p. 391
Where and When to Represent Students This Way and That Way: An Evaluation of Approaches to Diagnostic Assessment	p. 411
Some Suggestions for Alternative Assessments	p. 431
Author Index	p. 455
Subject Index	p. 461
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