Structural Assessment of Knowledge and Skill

A cognitively-based theoretical framework for the assessment of domain competence is proposed. The basic thesis is that to be knowledgeable one must know how the important concepts of a domain are interrelated. This implies that any valid assessment of knowledge must capture these structural properties. We describe the implementation of a structural approach in the assessment of classroom learning and review recent findings demonstrating its ability to predict classroom exam performance. The success of this approach is discussed in terms of the benefits derived from integrating the cognitive emphasis on structure and the psychometric emphasis on predictiveness.