Rasch KIDMAP - A History

"KIDMAP" was coined by Professor Benjamin D. Wright at the University of Chicago in 1978 to describe a clever way of displaying the details of a student's educational performances by indicating the items on which a student succeeded and failed in two dimensions. One dimension locates each item answered by difficulty. The other dimension stratifies the items by student success or failure. On the complete "map" a student's overall performance level, strengths and weaknesses are all clearly presented. (See KIDMAPs in RMT 4:1 p. 97, RMT 8:1 p. 345).

The KIDMAP idea is explained and illustrated in the International Encyclopedia of Education (1985, Pergamon Press, London) by Dr. John Martois under the entry "Kid-map" (p. 2810-12, with example).

The first large-scale implementation of KIDMAP took place in Los Angeles Independent County School District in the early 1980s. Hundreds of thousands of KIDMAP reports were distributed to parents.

In Australia, Geoff Masters explained the concept of a KIDMAP in an address to the Western Australian Institute for Educational Research in February 1982. In the mid-1980's, John Evans and Geoff Masters began producing KIDMAPs for schools in Victoria. One of these KIDMAPS was reproduced in Studies in Educational Evaluation (1986, 12:3, p. 264).

These KIDMAPS caught the attention of the New South Wales authorities who decided to make KIDMAPs one of the reports generated for students in the NSW Basic Skills Testing Program. Between 1989 and 1993, under the direction of Jan Lokan, the Australian Council for Educational Research distributed more than a million student KIDMAPs (known to Australian teachers as "Individual Student Reports") as part of that program.

Recently, the Educational Testing Centre at the University of New South Wales (Dr. James Tognolini, Director) has begun implementing KIDMAP as a method of reporting individuals' performances in its Mathematics Competitions. A recent newsletter of the ETC explains and provides an example of a KIDMAP.

Rasch KIDMAP - a history. Masters GN. … Rasch Measurement Transactions, 1994, 8:2 p.366

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