Cognitively diagnostic examination of Taiwanese mathematics achievement on TIMSS-1999

This empirical study was a substantive examination of the mathematics achievement of Taiwanese eighth-grade students participating in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study of 1999 (TIMSS-R). Rule-Space Methodology (RSM) was applied to produce a diagnostic description of these students' cognitive abilities and skills related to the TIMSS items.; The results indicate that the proposed cognitive attributes and Q-matrix represent the performance of Taiwanese eighth graders on the TIMSS-1999 mathematics tests very well. Furthermore, Taiwanese students perform well on all cognitive attributes expect for the recognizing pattern skill. As compared with the other mastery attributes, Taiwanese students show some weaknesses on thinking skills and algebra contents. As for group comparisons, gender differences of Taiwanese students in terms of mathematical skills are quite minimal. Male and female middle school students in Taiwan show comparatively equivalent potential in learning mathematical skills. The learning gap between urban and rural schools in Taiwan exists not only in students' total scores, but also in performance on cognitive attributes. Students in urban schools perform much better than those in rural schools on high-level mathematics contents and abstract thinking skills.; In the future, cognitive information from RSM may be utilized in constructing computerized adaptive tests. Continued development of RSM and statistical methods for analyzing the resulting information should help improve the interpretability of assessment results and lead to more widespread application of RSM.