Assessing Students’ Translation Competence: Integrating China’s Standards of English With Cognitive Diagnostic Assessment Approaches

Abstract

While translation competence assessment has been playing an increasingly facilitating role in translation teaching and learning, it still failed to offer fine-grained diagnostic feedback based on certain reliable translation competence standards. As such, this study attempted to investigate the feasibility of providing diagnostic information about students’ translation competence by integrating China’s Standards of English (CSE) with cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) approaches. Under the descriptive parameter framework of CSE translation scales, an attribute pool was established, from which seven attributes were identified based on students’ and experts’ think-aloud protocols. A checklist comprising 20 descriptors was developed from CSE translation scales, with which 458 students’ translation responses were rated by five experts. In addition, a Q-matrix was established by seven experts. By comparing the diagnostic performance of four widely-used cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs), linear logistic model (LLM) was selected as the optimal model to generate fine-grained information about students’ translation strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, relationships among translation competence attributes were discovered and diagnostic results were shown to differ across high and low proficiency groups. The findings can provide insights for translation teaching, learning and assessment.

Dealing with Missing Responses in Cognitive Diagnostic Modeling

“…Examples of such methodological advances include the extension and development of the models, such as the generalized DINA model (GDINA, [28]) and the multistrategy DINA model (MS-DINA; [29]), Q-matrix validation and refinement methods (e.g., [5,30,31]), the investigation of differential item functioning in CDMs (e.g., [6,32,33]), and the existence of various software tools such as the CDM [34] and GDINA [35] packages in R [36]. Examples of CDM applications are evidenced by studies collected in the special issue of "Cognitive Diagnosis and Q-Matrices in Language Assessment" (e.g., [21,22,37,38]) in the journal Language Assessment Quarterly, as well as many others (e.g., [2,17,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45]).…”