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The General Diagnostic Model

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Handbook of Diagnostic Classification Models

Part of the book series: Methodology of Educational Measurement and Assessment ((MEMA))

Abstract

The general diagnostic model (GDM) allows modeling dichotomous and polytomous item responses under the assumption that respondents differ with respect to multiple latent skills or attributes, and that these may be distributed differently across populations. Item responses can be of mixed format, dichotomous and/or polytomous, and skills/attributes can be binary, polytomous ordinal, or continuous. Variables that define populations can be observed, latent as in discrete mixture models, or partially missing. Unobserved grouping variables can be predicted based on hierarchical extensions of the GDM. It was shown that through reparameterization, the GDM contains the DINA as well as the logistic G-DINA, which is the same as the log-linear cognitive diagnostic model (LCDM), as special cases, and hence can fit all models that can be specified in these frameworks. Taken together, the GDM includes a wide range of diagnostic models, as well as item response theory (IRT), multidimensional IRT (MIRT), latent class models, located latent class models, multiple group and mixture versions of these models, as well as multilevel, and longitudinal extensions of these. This chapter introduces the GDM by means of a formal description of basic model assumptions and their generalizations and describes how models can be estimated in the GDM framework using the mdltm software. The software is free for research purposes, can handle very large databases up to millions of respondents and thousands of items, and provides efficient estimation of models through utilization of massively parallel estimation algorithms. The software was used operationally for scaling the PISA 2015, 2018, and PIAAC 2012 main study databases, which include hundreds of populations, grouping variables, and weights, and hundreds of test forms collected over five assessment cycles with a combined size of over two million respondents.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME), Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Matthias von Davier

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  1. Matthias von Davier
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Correspondence to Matthias von Davier .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME), Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Matthias von Davier

  2. Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Young-Sun Lee

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von Davier, M. (2019). The General Diagnostic Model. In: von Davier, M., Lee, YS. (eds) Handbook of Diagnostic Classification Models. Methodology of Educational Measurement and Assessment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05584-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05584-4_6

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