Cognitive diagnosis models for baseline testing of educational standards in math

Abstract

Cognitive diagnosis models received growing attention in recent psychometric literature in view of the potentiality for fine-grained analysis of examinees’ latent skills. Although different types and aspects of these models have been investigated in some detail, application to real-life data had so far been sparse. This paper aims at addressing different topics with respect to model building from a practitioner's perspective. The objective is to draw conclusions about examinees’ performance on the Austrian baseline testing of educational standards in math 2009. Although there is a variety of models at hand, the focus is set on the easy to interpret deterministic input, noisy ‘and’ gate model. A possible course of action with respect to model fit is outlined in detail and some conclusions with respect to test results are discussed.

Keywords:

• cognitive diagnosis model
• model building
• classification
• mathematics achievement
• eighth graders

AMS Subject Classification:

• 62-07
• 91C05

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank two anonymous referees whose valuable comments were helpful to clarify various aspects of the presentation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).