The Psychometric Modeling of Ordered Multiple-Choice Item Responses For Diagnostic Assessment With A Learning Progression

Abstract

An appealing feature of learning progressions is their potential to facilitate diagnostic assessment of student understanding. In this context, diagnostic assessment hinges upon the development of items (i.e., tasks, problems) that efficiently elicit student conceptions that can be related to a hypothesized learning progression. Briggs, Alonzo, Schwab, and Wilson (2006) introduced Ordered Multiple-Choice (OMC) items for this purpose. OMC items combine the efficiency of traditional multiplechoice items with the qualitative richness of responses to open-ended questions. The potential efficiency results because OMC items offer a constrained set of response options that can be scored objectively; the potential qualitative richness results because OMC response options are designed to correspond to students’ answers to open-ended questions and are explicitly linked to a discrete level of an underlying learning progression.KeywordsItem ResponseItem Response TheoryAssessment ItemLearning ProgressionPsychometric ModelingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.