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The level of difficulty of mathematical test items is a critical aspect for evaluating test quality and educational outcomes. Accurately predicting item difficulty during test creation is thus significantly important for producing effective test papers. This study used more than ten years of content and score data from China's Henan Provincial College Entrance Examination in Mathematics as an evaluation criterion for test difficulty, and all data were obtained from the Henan Provincial Department of Education. Based on the framework established by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) for test item assessment methodology, this paper proposes a new framework containing eight features considering the uniqueness of mathematics. Next, this paper proposes an XGBoost-based SHAP model for analyzing the difficulty of mathematics tests. By coupling the XGBoost method with the SHAP method, the model not only evaluates the difficulty of mathematics tests but also analyzes the contribution of specific features to item difficulty, thereby increasing transparency and mitigating the "black box" nature of machine learning models. The model has a high prediction accuracy of 0.99 for the training set and 0.806 for the test set. With the model, we found that parameter-level features and reasoning-level features are significant factors influencing the difficulty of subjective items in the exam. In addition, we divided senior secondary mathematics knowledge into nine units based on Chinese curriculum standards and found significant differences in the distribution of the eight features across these different knowledge units, which can help teachers place different emphasis on different units during the teaching process. In summary, our proposed approach significantly improves the accuracy of item difficulty prediction, which is crucial for intelligent educational applications such as knowledge tracking, automatic test item generation, and intelligent paper generation. These results provide tools that are better aligned with and responsive to students' learning needs, thus effectively informing educational practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The annual exam questions in China National College Entrance Examination (CNCEE, commonly known as Gaokao) have attracted wide attention from the entire society in China. This paper analyzes an important math exam question related to always holding inequalities with an unknown parameter from the 2020 CNCEE and builds different solutions via parameter separation or classified discussion, and then gives a systematic and effective design framework for questions related to problems of always holding inequalities and zeros of functions with an unknown parameter for the CNCEE. The framework reveals the internal mechanism of designing the math exam questions in the CNCEE. According to the design framework, two simulated math exam questions with reference solutions will be proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study commemorates this event by presenting a retrospective of the publications related to the use of mathematical tools for the analysis of economic, ecological, and environmental phenomena. We analyzed 1257 scientific publications using bibliometric techniques to examine the most productive and influential authors and their contributions in the economic, ecological, and environmental fields. Co-authorship among the top authors and countries, co-occurrence of the keywords, bibliographic coupling of the documents and authors, and author co-citation were analyzed by applying network analysis techniques using VOSviewer software, identifying the intellectual structure of the research and the collaborative networks in the fields. The results show that mathematics has grown impressively in terms of publication and citation. The contributions come from all over the world, but the majority are from the People's Republic of China and Spain. The results also show themes and trends in the economic, environmental, and ecological fields and a predominant use of mathematical tools in optimization processes in order to rigorously substantiate the decisions of investors and policymakers. Thus, our study offers support for any researcher to understand the current state of the art and develop a comprehensive understanding of journal publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]