METHODS FOR DETERMINING KNOWLEDGE STRUCTU RES - A COMPARATIVE-STUDY

The Theory of Knowledge Spaces of Doignon and Falmagne (1985) serves a s basis for developing and applying a class of economic procedures to knowledge assessment (see Falmagne & Doignon, 1988 a; Falmagne & Doign on 1988b). These procedures are based on an existing knowledge space c oncerning a set of diagnostic items. The construction of knowledge spa ces, however, is quite a difficult and demanding task. Three methods f or constructing knowledge spaces are investigated in this paper concer ning their applicability and the quality of their results: (1) the ana lysis of response patterns, (2) consultation of experts, and (3) conte nt-based item analysis. It is shown how those methods can be applied t o a set of chess problems. The pros and cons of the methods are discus sed. In order to evaluate the methods, the resulting knowledge spaces are compared with the response patterns obtained in two experimental i nvestigations.