Abstract:

This paper is a conceptual contribute to educational assessment on its methodological dimension using a balanced symbiosis between ontologies, concept maps and virtual environments (forum, wiki). The ontological structure considers the shared conceptual cores and aims to integrate the formal size of a knowledge domain with the daily practice of relational different communities of practice and learning (“assessment FOR learning”, Stiggins, 2002).
The aim of the research was to co-construct and experience an integrated learning environment called EduOntoWiki for providing an effective tool of consultation, discussion and learning to academic communities, schools and other education institutions. It was designed a development environment based on the possibility of activating processes to promote the sharing of meanings, making them easier not only among members of the scientific community/academic but also among those who employ and practise daily the theories and concepts of domain knowledge related to evaluation (teachers, trainers, experts). To achieve this goal the choice of a software wiki-based was crucial because the wiki interface is now a simpler and effective tool to allow a community, even inexperienced in advanced technological interfaces, to build knowledge in collaborative and dialogical mode (Souzis, 2005). So the construction of ontology is configured as a light-weight ontology where relations among concepts were considered not too bound to hard logical limits as happens in heavy-weight ontologies.
The hypothesis of multireferential educational assessment has provided a formal division of the scientific domain in five dimensional interpretations (Quillian, 1968): methodological, epistemological, phenomenological, referential and assiological. Higher-order concepts were identified from which the lower order concepts derived. They are further articulated, in a first step, in a hierarchical mind map and, in a second step, in a reticular concept map.
The research team focused on the second node of the conceptual network of the educational assessment ontology which covers the methodological dimension. The aim is to reflect on the methodological dimension (which connotes the evaluative actions); it is divided in three nodes: methods, measures and instruments.
The experimental research provides results that corroborate the spoken language based on conceptual maps. The evidences (provided by the results of this work) suggest that we could to further investigate non-linear communication models to face the assessment process by means of ontologies.

Keywords:

learning; ontologies; semantic representation; Web 2.0