Abstract:

A move to electronic study materials provides a multitude of possibilities for teachers to benefit from. These benefits include, but are not limited to, archiving each answer from each student, providing automatic and immediate feedback to students based on their answers and automatic assessment of exercises. The possibility to automatically assess exercises combined with the large amount of data gathered from all student answers provides further benefits: the possibility to analyze this data and identify those students who have not yet fully understood or have difficulties with the current subject matter.

ViLLE is a learning platform which is designed to provide teachers with easy access to a bank of electronic exercises, most of which are electronically assessed. ViLLE also collects and stores each answer given by all students, which allows for both manual and automatic analysis of these answers. Automatic analysis is possible for elementary mathematic core concepts, e.g. addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. Identifying problems in these concepts as early as possible is vital, as any issues will compound in further education.

ViLLE currently only gives a numeric value for the current skill level for each core concept. However, until now there was no threshold value for an issue in core concepts. This study improves on the value given by ViLLE and provides a threshold for the aforementioned core concepts. The threshold value gives teachers an additional method for identifying the students who have not yet fully understood a topic and need additional instruction. To validate the trustworthiness of this threshold, a standardized Finnish mathematics test for core concepts was used and the results from this test and ViLLE were compared. The final threshold was given by combining the results from these two sources.

Keywords:

Automatic assessment, primary school mathematics.