DINA Model and Parameter Estimation: A Didactic

Cognitive and skills diagnosis models are psychometric models that have immense potential to provide rich information relevant for instruction and learning. However, wider applications of these models have been hampered by their novelty and the lack of commercially available software that can be used to analyze data from this psychometric framework. To address this issue, this article focuses on one tractable and interpretable skills diagnosis model—the DINA model—and presents it didactically. The article also discusses expectation-maximization and Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms in estimating its model parameters. Finally, analyses of simulated and real data are presented.