Coarse-grained Assessment

• If the required assessment is coarse grained, such as a single number reporting the student’s competence on the current unit, then it is usually computed from several measures such as:
• A measure of progress and coverage, such as the number of problems solved or the number of correct steps.
• A measure of the amount of help given, such as the number of hint sequences started and the proportion that ended with a bottom-out hint.
• Some measure of competence, such as the frequency of incorrect initial steps, the time required to enter a correct step, or the number of attempts at a step before it is entered correctly.
• Psychometrics is the field that studies how to do this for conventional tests (e.g., multiple choice tests)
• One of their main tools is item-response theory IRT