Using the Item Response Theory (IRT) for Educational Evaluation Through Games

Abstract

This article shows the application of Item Response Theory (IRT) for educational evaluation using games. The article proposes a computational model to create user profiles, called Psychometric Profile Generator (PPG). PPG uses the IRT mathematical model for exploring the levels of skills and behaviors in the form of items and/or stimuli. The model was integrated with an educational game. The game was created considering a test applied by the Brazilian Government to evaluate students in national level, called Brazil Exam. The integration was used to evaluate the model in an educational scenario involving one hundred and thirteen students with an average age of 11 years old of a school in the south of Brazil. The results show PPG conducts an accurate evaluation because it considers not only the number of questions correctly answered but the proportional difficulty of each question in the evaluated group.