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Educative Self-Assessment Using Web Technology

Sivand Lakmazaheri, Ph.D. Educative Technologies LLC McLean, Virginia 22101 {sivand@EducativeTechnologies.net}

Introduction Student performance assessment can serve two purposes. It can be used as a measure of learning outcomes and as a tool for improving student learning. In the latter case, the aim of assessment is to identify students’ misconceptions and subsequently offer them timely corrective feedback. As an outcome-measuring tool student assessment occurs a limited number of times during the curriculum. As an educative means, assessment is a continuous activity throughout the curriculum.

The benefits of educative assessment for enhancing student learning are obvious. Its integration in engineering curricula, however, is impractical because of the tremendous time requirements that it imposes on the faculty, the size of the student population, and the general unwillingness of students to expose their misconceptions to their peers and instructors alike. These obstacles can be overcome by developing and making available to students software tools that support automated educative self-assessment. Such tools have the potential to qualitatively affect student learning without draining school resources in the process.

This paper examines a self-assessment system for students who are learning to construct shear and moment diagrams. This is an important topic in structural analysis and design, one that many students have difficulty mastering without a significant amount of practice and help. The approach described here involves automatically constructing a knowledge map for the students at the same time as they interactively construct shear and moment diagrams for various problems. The map, which highlights the student’s mistakes and misunderstandings, is then used to provide the student with meaningful corrective feedback at several levels. If the frequency of mistakes is not diminished over time, expert human intervention can be provided upon the student’s request.

Scope Learning-outcome assessment is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting evidence to determine how well performance matches established learning expectations [1]. In engineering, learning-outcome assessment usually occurs during the course of teaching, with student performance on homework assignments, examinations, and projects providing evidence of the level of learning. The instructor interprets this evidence to judge a student’s learning progress and then assigns a course grade that reflects this judgment. Although this assessment process could act as an incentive for learning, its primary purpose is to measure the level of a student’s learning, not reinforce learning.

“Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education”

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Lakmazaheri, S. (2005, June), Educative Self Assessment Using Web Technology Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--15275