Abstract:

Dynamic assessment is an interactive approach to psychological or psychoeducational assessment where intervention is embedded within the assessment procedure. A number of dynamic assessment procedures have been developed allowing for dynamic estimation of abilities and more accurate prediction of learners’ difficulties.

The paper proposes a method for dynamic, instructor-supervised, real-time assessment and adaptation of learning activities in the context of Unicorder™ Integral Game-Based Learning method described in previous author’s publication. The IPT Challenge Unicorder™ system operationalizes the proposed method and allows the students to continuously log their progress along the learning path of challenges, missions, and actions. This logging is done in multimodal (gesture, text, audio, video), low effort graphical user interface. The collected data is used to gamify the learning process, to allow immediate feedback and achievement recognition, as well as to present multimedia “stories” about the achievements. It uses continuous real-time assessment of learners’ performance for dynamic sequential and structural adaptation of the presented challenge actions.

The main purpose of the dynamic assessment is to determine the learners’ potential to acquire new skills. When done continuously in real-time in accordance with Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) principle it allows for dynamic adaptation of learning activities/resources/problems according to students’ previous and current performance. Challenge Unicorder™ tries to accomplish this by implementing different kinds of learning analytics statistically comparing the time necessary for student or group of students to accomplish finely-granular “learning by doing” actions.

Dynamic assessment methods can be classified in two major categories: Interventonist (emploing a predefined and rigid assessment procedure), and Interactionist (highly individualized, needed mediation is continuously negotiated during the instructor’s interaction with learners). Challenge Unicorder combines strengths of both approaches by providing students with predefined tasks called actions that are tracked in real time, and at the same time allowing both the students and instructor to initiate a Learning Support Transactions (LST) freely during the mission accomplishment. Using Unicorder™ students continuously log mission results in a transparent and easy way, by blogging the status of each action as short status text, picture, audio, video or combination of them. Instructor receives this data in real time in an easy to comprehend dashboard rich media format, together with learning analytics computed by the system based on historical data about learning actions accomplishment by previous learners. The live data can estimate the learner’s potential to accomplish the action, and can suggest the instructor a need for LST. LSTs can be accomplished in both online (using Unicorder), and in face-to-face modes, as preferred by the instructor. Some LSTs can also be initiated automatically based on predefined rules.

Based on learning statistics computed in real-time, Challenge Unicorder™ can dynamically enable certain “Easter egg” (in accordance with chosen game terminology) actions and missions (or dynamically rearrange them), in this way dynamically adapting both the structure and sequence of learning tasks.

The evaluation of the proposed framework is work in progress. Some preliminary results are discussed.

Keywords:

Dynamic assessment, real-time assessment, blogging, adaptive learning, learning analytics, gamification, active learning, pedagogical method, ZPD.