Abstract

“Knowing what the students know” recently has become the guiding principle of cognitive-based assessment. In the past, the process of assessment was built around a form of quasi-deductive reasoning, in which test developers deduced items from certain premises, the blue print or the objective list. In this paper, the author(s) discuss how abductive reasoning contributes to cognitive-based assessment in three routes. First, knowing alternative explanations is essential in understanding different levels of conceptions and misconceptions in order to develop the constructs being measured. Second, converse reasoning or reverse engineering applied in an abductive fashion is employed to retrospectively build the student’s mental model based on the end product. Third, analogical reasoning in the abductive reasoning mode is indispensable for cognitive modeling

Key words: Educational assessment, abductive reasoning, cognitive-based assessment