Method for assessing testing difficulty in educational sphere

The problem of testing in education is relevant for many countries. Testing solves three problems. The first task is to assess the quality of current training. The second task is to conduct a comparative analysis of learning outcomes. The third task is the management of the educational process in a particular educational institution and in the education sector. This determines the relevance of testing and the relevance of developing new methods for assessing test results. The article proposes a new method for assessing test results for different situations: “teacher– student”, computer test, virtual testing model, test on a mixed reality model and others. To solve the problem, a special quasi-sigmoidal function is introduced. It is analogous to the logistic function, but takes into account the peculiarities of real testing of students. The logistic function ranges from minus infinity to plus infinity. There are no negative assessments in education. The introduced function lies only in the positive range of the argument. It describes actual positive scores when testing students. The authors called this function the complexity function. With its help, the complexity of the subject is assessed according to the test results. To substantiate the method, the function of the logarithms of the odds, logistic regression and the resulting Rush method are investigated. The article notes two shortcomings of the Rush method. The testing principle has been defined for the new function, which is used to estimate complexity. The article introduces two new concepts: the test difficulty function and the integral test score. Integral assessment of testing is a smooth function and makes it possible to go from a stepwise dependence to a continuous one. The cumulative test score translates the point test results into a continuous function and creates a correlation between the scores. The results of an experiment with the participation of RTU MIREA students are presented. The experimental results are analyzed. The possibility of using the method in educational processes is shown. The method is an alternative to the Rush method.

Review and outlook of the integral test facility PKL III corresponding studies

This paper reviews an important integral test facility (ITF) named PKL (primary loop in German), which is designed based on a 4-loop pressurized water reactor (PWR) with the power 1 300 MWe, and especially concentrates on two aspects: (1) the tests at each developmental period of the facility until 2020, which is a typical microcosm of nuclear safety research; (2) the simulation of the PKL facility tests by using system thermal-hydraulic (STH) codes, especially RELAP5, TRACE and ATHLET. The results from the literature showed that all of these codes could reproduce the accident scenarios on the PKL facility to some extent, and simulate the complex phenomena both in the reactor pressurized vessel (RPV) and in the loops well, except some local phenomena (e. g., peak cladding temperature (PCT)). Furthermore, this paper presents some suggestions on PKL further tests. Especially, the sensitivity studies of initial conditions (ICs) and boundary conditions (BCs), test studies related to Extensive damage mitigation guidelines (EDMGs) and FLEX strategies, anticipated transients without scram (ATWS), detailed core section model, combination with other ITF or separate effects test (SET) facilities, and tests on advanced conception reactors are emphasized.

Approximating the Sum of Infinite Series of Non Negative Terms with reference to Integral Test

This paper describes a method of obtaining approximate sum of infinite series of positive terms by using integrals under its historical background. It has shown the application of improper integrals to determine whether the given innate series is convergent or divergent. Here, the limits of the integrals and the series usually extend to infinity though they may be slowly convergent. We have also established a relation to approximate the sum of infinite series of positive terms with a suitable example.