Cognitive Diagnostic Assessment: Critical Review of Iranian Studies

Over the past decade, cognitive diagnostics has been favored by educational researchers as an approach to assessing student achievement, but the use of DCMs has been criticized. Due to the tendency of Iranian researchers towards this type of assessment, this study was conducted with the aim of critically reviewing Iranian research in this field in order to analyze its methodology. For this purpose, the main relevant Iranian databases including SID, Google Scholar, Scopus, Noormags, Magiran, and Elmnet were searched, and 32 studies were considered. Considering the criteria for inclusion and exclusion of studies, 20 studies in this field that were conducted between 2015 and 2020 were selected. In the next step, the selected studies were critically reviewed independently by the researchers using the indicators recommended by Sessoms & Henson (2018). The indicators included the thematic focus of the research, the number of competencies, the constructs measured, the structure of the test items, the Q matrix, the statistical model type, the model fit, the item fit, the question type, the sample size, the evidence of reliability and validity, the description of the competencies (latent categories, the correlation between competencies, the competency profile), and the application of the results.The results showed that a large number of the research conducted did not provide empirical support for general assumptions such as correlation between attributes, did not provide sufficient evidence for reliability and validity, did not report on the competency profile, and did not provide feedback to stakeholders. We provide some guidelines to improve the quality of such models.