Implementation of Cognitive Diagnosis Modeling using the GDINA R Package
Abstract
Purpose: Well-designed
assessment methodologies and various cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) to
extract diagnostic information about examinees’ individual strengths and
weaknesses have been developed. Due to this novelty, as well as educational
specialists’ lack of familiarity with CDMs, their applications are not
widespread. This article aims at presenting the fundamentals of CDM and
demonstrating the various implementations using a freeware R package, namely,
the GDINA. Present article explains the basics of CDM and provide sufficient
details on the implementations so that it may guide novice researchers in CDM
applications
Research Methods: The manuscript starts with presenting the CDM
terminology, including input and output of a CDM analysis. The introduction
section is followed by generalized deterministic noisy and gate model
framework. A brief description of the package GDINA is also provided. Then,
numerical examples on various CDM analyses are provided using the R package
with a graphical user interface. The paper is concluded by some additional
functions and concluding remarks.
Results
and Implications for Research and Practice: Although other software
programs are also available, using the GDINA package offers users some
flexibilities such as allowing estimation of a wide range of CDMs and allowing
nonprogrammers to benefit from this package through the GUI. In addition to ordinary
CDM analyses, GDINA package further allows users to apply model selection at
the test- and item-level to make sure that the most appropriate CDM (i.e., CDM
that best explains the attribute interactions in the item) is fitted to the
response data. Furthermore, to identify possible item-attribute specification
mistakes in the Q-matrix, implementation of an empirical Q-matrix validation
method is available in the GDINA package. Lastly, this package offers various
handy graphs, which can be very useful in emphasizing important information and
comparing various parameters and/or statistics.
Keywords
References
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Details
Primary Language
English
Subjects
-
Journal Section
Research Article
Authors
Jimmy De La Torre
This is me
Publication Date
February 15, 2019
Submission Date
March 31, 2019
Acceptance Date
-
Published in Issue
Year 2019 Volume: 19 Number: 80