Dealing with Missing Responses in Cognitive Diagnostic Modeling

Abstract

Missing data are a common problem in educational assessment settings. In the implementation of cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs), the presence and/or inappropriate treatment of missingness may yield biased parameter estimates and diagnostic information. Using simulated data, this study evaluates ten approaches for handling missing data in a commonly applied CDM (the deterministic inputs, noisy “and” gate (DINA) model): treating missing data as incorrect (IN), person mean (PM) imputation, item mean (IM) imputation, two-way (TW) imputation, response function (RF) imputation, logistic regression (LR), expectation-maximization (EM) imputation, full information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimation, predictive mean matching (PMM), and random imputation (RI). Specifically, the current study investigates how the estimation accuracy of item parameters and examinees’ attribute profiles from DINA are impacted by the presence of missing data and the selection of missing data methods across conditions. While no single method was found to be superior to other methods across all conditions, the results suggest the use of FIML, PMM, LR, and EM in recovering item parameters. The selected methods, except for PM, performed similarly across conditions regarding attribute classification accuracy. Recommendations for the treatment of missing responses for CDMs are provided. Limitations and future directions are discussed.