Spotting Erroneous Rules of Operation by the Individual Consistency Index.

The diagnosis of misconceptions is an important part of teaching. Recently, psychologists and measurement specialists have become increasingly interested in the examination of patterns of responses to test items for the purpose of detecting misconceptions. These attempts are motivated by the belief that response patterns contain much more information than simple right/wrong scores-a belief that has received considerable empirical support from such studies as that by Birenbaum and Tatsuoka (1982). The most promising approaches are methods that concentrate on identifying erroneous algorithms through an analysis of the errors students make in responding to test items.