Abstract
Cognitive diagnosis models of educational test performance decompose ability in a domain into a set of specific binary skills called attributes. (Non-)mastery of attributes documents an examinee’s strengths and weaknesses in the domain as a profile of mental aptitude. Distinct attribute profiles define classes of intellectual proficiency to which examinees can be assigned. Nonparametric, model-free classification methods have been proposed as heuristic or approximate alternatives to maximum likelihood estimation procedures for assigning examinees to proficiency classes. These classification techniques use as input a statistic obtained by aggregating each examinee’s test item scores into a profile of attribute sum-scores. This study demonstrates that clustering examinees into proficiency classes based on their item scores rather than on their attribute sum-score profiles results in a more accurate classification of examinees.
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Köhn, HF., Chiu, CY., Brusco, M.J. (2013). The Comparison of Two Input Statistics for Heuristic Cognitive Diagnosis. In: Millsap, R.E., van der Ark, L.A., Bolt, D.M., Woods, C.M. (eds) New Developments in Quantitative Psychology. Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics, vol 66. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9348-8_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9348-8_21
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