CognitiveComplexityofFCATTestItems.pdfVIP

COGNITIVE COMPLEXITY CLASSIFICATION OF FCAT TEST ITEMS The benchmarks in the Sunshine State Standards (SSS) identify knowledge and skills students are expected to acquire at each grade level, with the underlying expectation that students also demonstrate critical thinking. Goal 3, Standard 4, of Florida’s System of School Improvement and Accountability makes this expectation clear: Florida students use creative thinking skills to generate new ideas, make the best decisions, recognize and solve problems through reasoning, interpret symbolic data, and develop efficient techniques for lifelong learning. Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test? (FCAT) test items, while assessing SSS benchmarks, must also reflect this goal and standard. It is important to develop items that elicit the complexity of knowledge and skills required to meet these objectives. The degree of challenge of FCAT multiple-choice items is currently categorized in two ways: item difficulty and cognitive complexity. Item difficulty has two meanings, depending on the stage of item development. Before testing, item difficulty is a prediction of the percentage of students who will choose the correct answer. After testing, item difficulty refers to the percentage of students who actually chose the correct answer. Items for which the correct answer is chosen by more than 70 percent of the students are considered easy. Items for which the correct answer is chosen by 40–70 percent of the students are considered average. Items for which the correct answer is chosen by less than 40 percent of the students are considered challenging. Cognitive complexity refers to the cognitive demand associated with an item. In the early years of the FCAT program, the DOE used Bloom’s Taxonomy1 to classify test items; however, Bloom’s Taxonomy is difficult to use because it requires an inference about the skill, knowledge, and background of the students respond