An investigation of the nature of the influences of item stem and option representation on student responses to a mathematics test

摘要

In teaching, representations are used as ways to illustrate the concepts underlying a specific topic. For example, use symbols (e.g., 1 + 2 = 3) to express the concept of addition. To compare students’ abilities to interpret different representations in mathematics, the symbolic representation (SR) test and the pictorial representation (PR) test were designed, and then administered to 681 sixth graders in Taipei, Taiwan. This study adopts two different modeling perspectives, the testlet perspective and the multi-ability perspective, to analyze this SR and PR test data in the context of item response theory. The main results show that:1. Students scored on average significantly higher on the SR test than the PR test.