Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Gain scores are obtained as the difference between two consecutive measurements of knowledge. Although they arewidely acknowledged as a measure of change, they have been harshly criticized since empirical research has shown itsserious conceptual problems. To gain insight on the nature of these problems, I developed a model for the gains ofknowledge in the setting of a pretest-posttest instructional intervention. The model explains seemingly odd phenomenaassociated to gain scores: (a) negative gain-pretest correlations, and (b) lack of correlations between gain scores andlearner’s cognitive abilities. This highlights the potential of the proposed model for investigating the change of knowledgein a pretest-posttest educational setting and emphasizes the importance of modelling change by using information providedby specific application areas. Further work may lead to developing novel statistical methods for analysing educational dataand for estimating the change of knowledge in diverse educational contexts.