CONTRIBUTIONS OF ITEM RESPONSE THEORY IN EDUCATIONAL ASSESSMENTS

For a long time, psychologists and educators, care to design, develop and implement evaluation methods that represent as closely as possible the learning results. Initially, evaluations were based on scores from the called Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Classical Theory of Measure (TCM). In this context arises the Item Response Theory (IRT), a powerful statistical tool that can meet the needs arising from the limitations of TCT. The purpose of this paper is to present the main contributions of Item Response Theory in relation to classical test theory, in the context of educational evaluations, and present an illustration of these contributions IRT, through simulations.