An Measurement Method of Ancient Poetry Difficulty for Adaptive Testing

Abstract

As traditional Chinese culture education grows fast, adaptive testing for ancient poetry seems promising. The prerequisite of adaptive learning is question bank, while the quality of question bank depends on the rationality of question difficulty. The paper proposes a method that measures ancient poetry difficulty for objective questions and builds a measurement system. The method includes five steps: (1) Identify the verses corresponding to the question. (2) Get four indexes of the corresponding verses: search volume, correctly answered frequency, sentence length and grade of the textbook which includes the verses.(3) Use analytic hierarchy process to index system for weight assignment. (4) Compute the weighted sum of the four indexes as the measurement of difficulty. (5) Classify the question bank according to the calculated difficulty. Experimental results showed the effectiveness of this measurement method, which thereby can be used in various adaptive testing of ancient poetry.