Abstract:

Research is described on a system for web-assisted education and how it is used to deliver on-line quiz questions, automatically suited to individual students. The system can store and display all of the various pieces of information used in a class-room (slide, examples, handouts, quiz items) and give individualized quizzes (allocating items) to participating students. This paper describes the system and gives results from research done using it, along with comparisons to other educational methods.

Experiments have shown that both the item database and the item allocation methods are important and examples are given on how these need to be tuned for each course. Different item allocation methods are discussed and a method is proposed for comparing several such schemes. It is clearly seen that students improve their knowledge through the use of the system. Classical statistical models which do not include learning but are designed for mere evaluation are therefore not applicable.

The system is built on the basic theme that it is for learning rather than evaluation. In particular a student is permitted to continue requesting quiz questions until a satisfactory grade is obtained. The resulting challenge is therefore how such a grade should be computed so as to reflect actual knowledge at the time of computation and be a clear indication for the student. To name a few methods, a grade can in principle be computed based on all available answers on a topic, on the last few answers or on answers up to a given number of attempts, but all of these have obvious problems.

Keywords:

Web-assisted education, item allocation.