Employment of Item Response Theory to measure change in Children's Analogical Thinking Modifiability Test

Abstract

Dynamic testing, with an intermediate phase of assistance, measures changes between pretest and post-test assuming a common metric between them. To test this assumption we applied the Item Response Theory in the responses of 69 children to dynamic cognitive testing Children's Analogical Thinking Modifiability Test adapted, with 12 items, totaling 828 responses, with the purpose of verifying if the original scale yields the same results as the equalized scale obtained by Item Response Theory in terms of "changes quantifying". We followed the steps: 1) anchorage of the pre and post-test items through a cognitive analysis, finding 3 common items; 2) estimation of the items' difficulty level parameter and comparison of those; 3) equalization of the items and estimation of "thetas"; 4) comparison of the scales. The Children's Analogical Thinking Modifiability Test metric was similar to that estimated by the TRI, but it is necessary to differentiate the pre and post-test items' difficulty, adjusting it to samples with high and low performance.