Item Response Theory Modeling of High School Students’ Behavior in a High-Stakes Exam - Open Access Library Journal

OALibJ > Vol.6 No.2, February 2019

Open Access Library Journal

Volume 6, Issue 2 (February 2019)

ISSN Print: 2333-9705 ISSN Online: 2333-9721

Google-based Impact Factor: 0.73 Citations

Item Response Theory Modeling of High School Students’ Behavior in a High-Stakes Exam ()

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DOI: 10.4236/oalib.1105242 516 Downloads 1,048 Views Citations

Author(s)

Helen Gomes¹, Raul Matsushita², Sergio Da Silva^2*

Affiliation(s)

¹Department of Statistics, University of Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil.
²Department of Statistics, University of Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil.
²Department of Economics, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianopolis, Brazil.

ABSTRACT

We put forward a model based on item response theory that highlights the role of latent features called “proficiency” and “propensity”. The model is adjusted to data from the decisions made in a high-stakes exam taken by 10,822 Brazilian high school students. Our model aims to recover infor-mation regarding the role the latent features (proficiency and propensity) play in a decision. We find that the decision of responding or not and also the decision of responding correctly or not in a group of items can be described by a two-dimensional logistic model, even if there are imperfections from an item-by-item adjustment. Not only proficiency, but also refraining from responding is found to depend on both the characteristics of the items and the latent features of the students. In particular, the least proficient students prefer to leave an item blank, rather than respond it incorrectly. There is a negative linear correlation between scoring in the exam and propensity, and scoring and proficiency are positively correlated although nonlinear.

KEYWORDS

Psychometrics, Item Response Theory, Student Behavior, High-Stakes Exams

Share and Cite:

Gomes, H. , Matsushita, R. and Silva, S. (2019) Item Response Theory Modeling of High School Students’ Behavior in a High-Stakes Exam. Open Access Library Journal, 6, 1-22. doi: 10.4236/oalib.1105242.

Cited by

[1]	On the treatment of missing item responses in educational large-scale assessment data: An illustrative simulation study and a case study using PISA 2018 …
	European Journal of Investigation in Health …, 2021

[2]	On the treatment of missing item responses in educational large-scale assessment data: The case of PISA 2018 mathematics
	2021

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