Most existing diagnostic models are developed to detect whether students have mastered a set of skills of interest, but few have focused on identifying what scientific misconceptions students possess. This article developed a general dual-purpose model for simultaneously estimating students' overall ability and the presence and absence of…

Despite considerable advances in knowledge tracing algorithms, educational technologies that use this technology typically continue to use older algorithms, such as Bayesian Knowledge Tracing. One key reason for this is that contemporary knowledge tracing algorithms primarily infer next-problem correctness in the learning system, but do not…

Exploring the relationship between student ability and test-taking effort is an important area of study, offering insights into their approach to educational assessments. Previous research shows this relationship, yet there is a scarcity of research comparing the test-taking effort of students. In addition, researchers have frequently employed…

Studied the calculating ability used by a low IQ savant to identify prime numbers in two experiments comparing him to control subjects, one involving reaction time and the other involving inspection time. Concludes that this individual uses a complex computational algorithm to identify primes and discusses the apparent contradiction of his low IQ.…

The equivalence of pencil and paper Rasch item calibrations when used in a computer adaptive test administration was explored in this study. Items (n=726) were precalibarted with the pencil and paper test administrations. A computer adaptive test was administered to 321 medical technology students using the pencil and paper precalibrations in the…

Two-stage and multistage test designs provide a way of roughly adapting item difficulty to test-taker ability. All test takers take a parallel stage-one test, and, based on their scores, they are routed to tests of different difficulty levels in subsequent stages. These designs provide some of the benefits of standard computerized adaptive testing…

On well-constructed multiple-choice tests, the most serious threat to measurement is not variation in item discrimination, but the guessing behavior that may be adopted by some students. Ways of ameliorating the effects of guessing are discussed, especially for problems in latent trait models. A new item response model, including an item parameter…

Twenty multiple-choice vocabulary items and 20 free-response vocabulary items were administered to 660 college students. The free-response items consisted of the stem words of the multiple-choice items. Testees were asked to respond to the free-response items with synonyms. A computer algorithm was developed to transform the numerous…