A Study Of Senior High School Students’ English Reading Ability Based On DINA Cognitive Diagnostic Model

Cognitive diagnosis,as a combination of psychometrics and cognition,is regarded as the foundation of psychometrics.It can diagnose students’ microscopic cognitive characteristics and macroscopic reading ability in comparison to traditional diagnostic exams.The DINA cognitive diagnostic model is one of the mostly used cognitive diagnostic models in the actual measurement of cognitive diagnoses.It is characterized by the simplicity and high accuracy of the model,and has been shown to have high adaptability to language tests,especially reading comprehension exams,and it is a cognitive diagnostic model with a good fit to reading comprehension exams.Based on cognitive diagnostic theory,a total of 105 students from the second-year of No.X Senior High School in Nanning were chosen as research subjects,namely Class12(key class)and Class 25(regular class).By using the DINA cognitive diagnostic model and a senior high school English reading cognitive diagnostic test paper,a cognitive diagnostic study on the subjects’ English reading ability was conducted.The research questions were as follows: 1)What is the overall English reading ability of senior high school students? 2)What are the students’ abilities in terms of the eight cognitive attributes according to the diagnostic results? 3)What are the differences in English reading ability between key and regular classes?The results show that(1)The probability of mastering all eight senior high school English reading cognitive attributes was above 0.80,which indicates that the subjects’ overall English reading ability is good;(2)The senior high school student’s mastery of the eight English reading cognitive attributes is good in general.However,the distribution is uneven,with a higher probability of mastering the cognitive attributes A1(Difficult Vocabulary),A5(Reasoning),and A7(Correct Option Processing Level),reflecting the students’ higher cognitive attribute ability,and a lower probability of mastering the cognitive attribute A4(Comprehension of Rhetorical and Organization)and A8(Main Idea),reflecting a lower cognitive attribute ability of students;(3)There are some differences in the mastery probability of cognitive attributes between the two classes.The cognitive attributes of the key class are higher than those of the regular class as a whole.Meanwhile,the cognitive attributes of A3(Understanding of Intersentence Relationships)and A8(Main Idea)are lower than those of the regular class.The mastery probability of A5(Reasoning)is the same between the two classes.According to the diagnosis results and interviews,the corresponding remedial measures were further put forward for each cognitive attribute,especially the cognitive attribute with low mastery probability.For example,aiming at the cognitive attributes of A2(Sentence Comprehension),A4(Comprehension of Rhetorical and Organization)and A8(Main Idea),some teaching remedial measures were proposed,such as paying attention to the analysis of long and difficult sentences,summarizing the characteristics of various rhetorical devices,and summarizing and practicing the general idea of each paragraph.This study confirms the feasibility of applying DINA cognitive diagnostic model to senior high school English reading cognitive diagnosis to analyze students’ English reading ability.Based on the findings,corresponding effective remedial measures are given for the mastery of different cognitive attributes,which have certain implications for senior high school English reading teaching.