An Agent-based Approach to Support Formative Assessment

The formative assessment process and the difficulties found in online assessment overloads the educators activities. The doctoral research presented in this paper aims to reduce this overload through a formative assessment support based on interface agents

OTSUKA, J. L., ROCHA, H. V. An Agent-based Approach to Support Formative Assessment. In: 2002 International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE 2002). Auckland, New Zealand. IEEE Computer Society Press, 3-6 December, 2002.

An Agent-based Approach to Support Formative Assessment

Joice Lee Otsuka, Heloísa Vieira da Rocha (advisor)

Institute of Computing – University of Campinas (Unicamp)

P.O. Box 6176 Zip Code: 13083-970 - Campinas, SP – Brazil

{joice, heloisa}@ic.unicamp.br

Abstract

The formative assessment process and the difficulties found in online assessment overloads the educators activities. The doctoral research presented in this paper aims to reduce this overload through a formative assessment support based on interface agents.

1Research Goals

The goal of the doctoral research presented in this paper is to propose a formative assessment support to TelEduc1, a web based distance education environment. The TelEduc Project has been developed since 1997 by the Nucleus of Informatics Applied to Education and the Institute of Computing, both from University of Campinas [1].

The formative assessment has been used as an alternative to the traditional assessment based on exams, and allows the continuous monitoring and orientation of the learning process [2]. In distance education, the formative assessment is even more important since the online assessment has some intrinsic difficulties, such as the absence of the face-to-face interactions feedback, the lack of instructor control over the assessment and the authentication problem (who is performing the assessment?).

In this context, the instructors need to take extra steps to monitor learners’ performance and comprehension, and the formative assessment helps instructors to ensure that the learners are on the right track and to detect learning problems [3]. An advantage to be explored in online formative assessment is the possibility of saving all interactions for later analysis. Formative assessment also offers some control over the authentication problem, since the instructor becomes 1Teleduc is an open source software, with free distribution at http://www.nied.unicamp.br familiar with the writing styles and the abilities of inpidual students, so that changes on writing styles would be an alert. So the interest on formative assessment supports research.

Nevertheless, the formative assessment has high costs, making necessary to explore the development of intelligent and automatic mechanisms to help collecting and analysing assessment relevant data and making decisions based on these data, aiming to reduce the instruct overload and consequently, the formative assessment costs.

It is not possible to predict an ideal set of assessment methods and criteria on formative assessment that supplies the pedagogical goals of any teacher in any course because they change according to the context. Thus the formative assessment demands a flexible support, that is, it should be adaptable to different contexts. This is the present doctoral research’s specific goal.

2Partial Results

At this moment the formative assessment on TelEduc is supported through the monitoring of its communication tools logs (Discussion Forums, Chat, Portfolio, Mail, Bulletin Board) and the analysis of the data generated by the Accesses and InterMap tools. The Accesses tool allows the generation of reports on student access (to the course or tools), and the InterMap tool uses visualisation techniques to map the interactions, making easier to visualise the students’ participation [4].

The formative assessment process and the difficulties found in online assessment overloads the educators activities. The doctoral research presented in this paper aims to reduce this overload through a formative assessment support based on interface agents

A recent participation on a teachers’ distance

preparation course based on formative assessment, using the TelEduc support, allowed us to evidence the instructor overload using this assessment approach [5]. The teacher’s main roles on this process are explained briefly: (1) Tasks elaboration: to define the learning goals and to elaborate appropriate assessment tasks that orientate learners to achieve those goals; (2) Monitoring: to monitor and analyse the learner behaviour, to detect problems and to generate reports based on this monitoring; (3) Orientation: to motivate the active participation and to incentive the collaboration through the continuous and constructive interventions on learning process; (4) Learning quality analysis: to collect and to analyse useful information in order to verify the learning quality during the requested tasks development.

The assessment support model that has been developed in this research aims to reduce the instructor overload. The initial proposed model explores the software agents technology, specifically, interface agents based on machine learning techniques [6], that observes and learns with the instructor, trying to provide a flexible and customised assistance to the teacher’s particular necessities. The interface agents are going to explore the distance courses’ interaction records and filter, search and analyse important information, according to the teacher’s pedagogical goals.

Initially the model has three modules, whose functionalities are presented briefly here:?Monitoring Module: (1) to monitor the learners interaction and the ongoing tasks; (2) to select and present the relevant monitoring information (based on instructor’s interests); (3) to detect the possible problems on lea …… 此处隐藏：6562字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……