MATH ONLINE TESTS: A RASCH ANALYSIS

The M.In.E.R.Va. project, which was presented at EDULEARN 2014 and 2016, was developed to help students of secondary schools to recover their deficiencies in Mathematics. As the experimentation has produced good results, we extended the project to Calculus and Financial Mathematics courses in Catholic University in Milan. We will use Rasch Analysis and other statistical techniques (e.g. Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory) to prove the “goodness” of the multiple-choice questions that we used in the online exercises and to perform a differential analysis, dividing students in subgroups, in order to individuate the “disturbing” variables. We found that a few questions were problematic. In this case, the common approach is to change the question. We preferred instead to change the didactic approach to the subject of the question and to change the question only if the performance remains low. Since this trial showed quite good results, we can conclude that the platform can be successfully used to point out early problematic subjects and to intervene immediately.