Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Cognitive diagnostic assessment
2.1.1 Introduction to cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA)
Cognitive psychology refers to human mental processes, such as learning, reasoning, and decision making (Lachman et al., 2015). It encompasses the multiple processes through which individuals acquire, interpret, and integrate information from their surroundings and involves a range of mental functions, including perception, learning, memory retention and retrieval, reasoning, problem-solving, and the comprehension and production of language. As modern society education demands grow, education measurement theories continue to advance. Among these, cognitive diagnostic theory stands as an important branch within the fields of psychometrics and educational assessment. Nichols (1994) put forward the term cognitively diagnostic assessment (CDA), he brought up a framework of CDA to reveal the mechanisms test takers use in responding to test items, and provided important guidance to future development effort. It focuses on combining cognitive psychology with psychometrics to show the cognitive processing process of participants’ responses so as to reveal the cognitive processing characteristics. And the method is called cognitive level research paradigm (Mislevy, 1993). Students’ thinking on academic tasks cannot be observed and evaluated directly. Rather, students’ thinking must be judged from their performance on a given task. (Leighton & Gierl, 2007). It aims to diagnose students' cognitive skills and mastery of knowledge in specific fields through refined cognitive diagnostic model analysis. Unlike traditional testing methods, not only does cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs) provide reports of overall scores of test-takers but also delve into their performance for different cognitive attributes, providing a basis for personalized feedback and intervention. In terms of applied research on cognitive diagnosis, scholars can collect and analyze data from various domains and backgrounds to explore individuals' cognitive processes and structures, offering precise and effective diagnostic tools and methods for education, psychology, and other related fields. At the same time, research on cognitive diagnostic theory itself is also advancing, including the evaluation and refinement of current cognitive diagnostic models, as well as the development of new models.
2.2 Review of business English listening comprehension
2.2.1 Definition and theories of listening skill
First of all, before explaining more about Business English listening skill, let us first define what listening skill is. Listening in a language means much more than just hearing the sound waves coming our way: it also includes paying attention to, interpreting, and remembering those sounds as we try to figure out what someone is saying to us (Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010). The mental effort involved when we are listening to another person's speech can include attention processes; deciding what the meaning might be based on information contained within words or word groups; creating associations between concepts conveyed by heard utterances; using working memory resources to track where sentences start and end; linking grammatical elements like nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., which together make up sentence structure while simultaneously trying not to lose track of how individual pieces fit into larger contextually meaningful chunks known collectively under terms like "utterance," “phrases,” “clauses” -- basically anything bigger than one single word said aloud by speaker A t
