The Role of Abductive Reasoning in Cognitive-Based Assessment

Abstract

“Knowing what the students know” recently has become the guiding principle of cognitive-based
assessment. In the past, the process of assessment was built around a form of quasi-deductive reasoning, in which
test developers deduced items from certain premises, the blue print or the objective list. In this paper, the author(s)
discuss how abductive reasoning contributes to cognitive-based assessment in three routes. First, knowing
alternative explanations is essential in understanding different levels of conceptions and misconceptions in order to
develop the constructs being measured. Second, converse reasoning or reverse engineering applied in an abductive
fashion is employed to retrospectively build the student’s mental model based on the end product. Third, analogical
reasoning in the abductive reasoning mode is indispensable for cognitive modeling.