Constructing, improving, and shortening tests for skill assessment

The work deals with the assessment of the set of skills an individual has available in a certain disciplinary domain (which is called the competence state) from the responses of this individual to test items. Competence-based test development is introduced as a novel approach for developing tests for skill assessment. Given a fixed collection of skills of interest in the disciplinary domain, the resulting tests are as informative as possible about individuals’ competence states. The development of conjunctive (all skills associated with an item are necessary for solving it) and disjunctive (each of the skills associated with a certain item is sufficient for solving it) tests is considered. Various applications of the proposed methodology are presented. They cover different scenarios, such as the construction of a test from scratch, or the improvement and shortening of an existing test.