Using mutual information for adaptive student assessments

When we have an item bank available for assessing students, we would like to select the test items that can reveal students´ knowledge levels as effectively and accurately as possible. This may not be a trivial task when we consider the fact that students´ item-response patterns may not reflect their competence exactly. Theoretical and experimental results reported in this paper indicate that mutual information between test items and educational targets provides a principled and instrumental basis for adaptively selecting test items for student assessments.