ABSTRACT
Psychometric advances have been made in modeling how the application of cognitive skills and knowledge interfaces with test item responses. This area of research is known as cognitive diagnosis. Cognitively diagnostic assessment holds the promise of yielding useful and detailed information about student knowledge in areas such as mathematics, language, and other areas of higher education. In turn, this information can help in guiding individualized learning, allow for insight into how learning progresses longitudinally, and even give precise feedback with curriculum development. Pioneering and fundamental research in this area has been done under a framework known as the Rule Space Method (RSM). RSM has been successfully applied to create diagnostic scoring reports for the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT) and they have been distributed to several million students since 2003.
