DCM Scoring in Mastery View Formative Assessments
Mastery View Formative Assessments use DCM scoring to determine student mastery. This document will assist you in understanding what your students’ DCM scores mean and why some elements of your assessment results are different from your other Mastery Connect assessments.
Diagnostic Classification Model (DCM) Scoring
Most traditional academic scoring models rely on lengthy tests with lots of questions that are all scored somewhat equally. These assessments require many questions in order to give the most accurate, detailed data about student mastery. DCM scoring is different in this way because DCM scoring does not score each question equally. Instead, it uses a research-backed algorithm to weigh the importance of which questions a student gets right or wrong before calculating the final score. This scoring method gives teachers a more precise and clear view of which students have mastered a standard and which students could use more help to master a standard.
Mastery View Formative Assessments use DCM scoring, which reduces the time students spend taking tests while still giving teachers reliable results and mastery data. When using DCM scoring, each question is specifically designed to represent different difficulty levels of academic standards. The specific questions answered incorrectly by a student determines their probability of being placed in one mastery category or another. For example, some students who get three out of five questions correct on a Mastery View Formative Assessment can still be sorted into a different mastery category than another student who got three out of five correct because of which items each student answered correctly.
Mastery View Scores in Mastery Connect
For students, Mastery View Formative Assessments are taken like any other assessment. Instructors can use Performance Grader and GradeCam to score Mastery View Formative Assessments, but instructors cannot enter raw scores to determine mastery in Mastery View Formative Assessments. All raw score entries in a Mastery View Formative Assessment will automatically place the student in the Remediation mastery level for that assessment.
Mastery View Formative Assessments have preset scoring and mastery levels which cannot be edited. Mastery View Formative Assessment scores are not based on a cut score, as with other Mastery Connect assessments, but are based on the DCM scoring algorithm. This means that a student’s mastery levels are based more on which questions the student gets right instead of how many questions the student gets right.
