Cognitive diagnosis models for multiple strategies

Abstract

Cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) have been used as psychometric tools in educational assessments to estimate students proficiency profiles. However, most CDMs assume that all students adopt the same strategy when approaching problems in an assessment, which may not be the case in practice. This study develops a generalized multiple-strategy CDM for dichotomous response data. The proposed model provides a unified framework to accommodate various condensation rules (e.g., conjunctive, disjunctive, and additive) and different strategy selection approaches (i.e., probability-matching, over-matching, and maximizing). Model parameters are estimated using the marginal maximum likelihood estimation via expectation-maximization algorithm. Simulation studies showed that the parameters of the proposed model can be adequately recovered and that the proposed model was relatively robust to some types of model misspecifications. A set of real data was analysed as well to illustrate the use of the proposed model in practice.