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Jan 8, 2010, 11:53am

Message Board :: FCAT Info :: Item Response Theory :: Item Response Theory

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Topic: Item Response Theory (Read 51 times)

Zach Forn
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Item Response Theory
« Thread Started on Nov 18, 2006, 10:56am »

The computer that grades the FCAT test will not give full credit for a CORRECT answer if it "thinks" the answer was a guess!!! Now, tell me, how can a computer know if your guessing!!?? The program the computer uses to do this is based on something called Item Response Theory.

Again, how the heck can a computer attempt to figure out all the stuff that is going on in a student's mind when that student is reading, thinking, and answering questions!! That seems a little science-fiction doesn't it?

For example, last spring after my students took the FCAT I asked them to tell me (if they could remember) some things they were thinking about during the test that had nothing to do with the test. Here is a list of some of those things:

"somebody farted"
food/being hungry
homework for other classes
"how does impotence work?"
"liking the guy behind me, and I wore the dumbest shirt"
being beat up after school
"my pencil lead broke and I began wondering what the inside of a school pencil sharpener looks like"
a poster on the wall showing Macbeth fighting
"the story kept reminding me of my dad and I kept thinking about last fall"
"my pits were sweating...bad"
"my answers were falling into a pattern, and I didn't want to break that pattern even if I knew the answer was wrong" (!!!!)

All these responses came from ONE student!!! A student who does well in my class. What's more she told me she thought all of this in the span of a couple of minutes!!!

How can a computer program attempt to understand these sorts of mental processes and then attempt to quantify how these wonderings produce what it deems "knowledge" or "guessing"????

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