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A competency addition procedure for constructing minimal, yet maximally informative tests for skill assessment
Pasquale Anselmi1, Jürgen Heller2, Luca Stefanutti3
1Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology (FISPPA), University of Padova, Via Venezia 14, 35131, Padova, Italy. pasquale.anselmi@unipd.it.
Behavior Research Methods
|August 3, 2026
Summary
Competence-based test development creates informative and minimal tests by identifying essential skills (competencies). A new iterative procedure helps construct these optimized tests for various applications.
Area of Science:
- Psychometrics
- Educational Measurement
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Traditional test development may not fully capture an individual's skill set.
- Existing tests can be lengthy and contain redundant items, reducing efficiency.
Purpose of the Study:
- Introduce a novel method for competence-based test development.
- Develop an iterative procedure to construct informative and minimal tests.
- Demonstrate the procedure's utility in real-world assessment scenarios.
Main Methods:
- Defined competencies as sets of skills required for item mastery.
- Introduced the concept of a 'reduct' for efficient competency representation.
- Developed the competency addition procedure, an iterative algorithm for reduct construction.
Main Results:
- The competency addition procedure successfully identifies reducts.
- Tests derived from reducts are both informative and minimal.
- The procedure is adaptable for test construction, improvement, and shortening.
Conclusions:
- Competence-based test development offers a principled approach to creating efficient assessments.
- The competency addition procedure provides a practical method for implementing this approach.
- This methodology has broad applicability in educational and psychological measurement.
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