The Rasch Model for Evaluating Italian Student Performance

In 1997 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for collecting information about 15-year-old students in participating countries. Our study analyses the PISA 2006 cognitive test for evaluating the Italian student performance in mathematics, reading and science comparing the results of different local governments. For this purpose the most proper statistic methodology is Item Response Theory--IRT--that collects several models, the simplest is Rasch Model--RM (1960). As the items used in the analysis are both dichotomous and polytomous, we apply Partial Credit Model (PCM). (Contains 7 figures and 8 tables.)