Using Mutual Information for Adaptive Item Comparison and Student Assessment
Chao-Lin Liu · 2005
The author analyzes properties of mutual information between dichotomous concepts and test items. The properties generalize some common intuitions about item comparison, and provide principled foundations for designing item-selection heuristics for student assessment in computer-assisted educational systems. The proposed item-selection strategies along with some common and conceivable methods, including mutual information-based methods and Euclidean and Mahalanobis distance-based methods, for student classification are evaluated in a simulation-based environment. The simulator relies on Bayesian networks for capturing the uncertainty in students ’ responses to test items. Simulated results indicate that the heuristics built upon the theoretical properties offer satisfactory performance profiles for item selection, and, not surprisingly, mutual information-based methods offer better performance for the task of student classification than distance-based methods.