Abstract:

New technologies have made a difference between traditional learning and technological-based learning. It is common to see interactive whiteboards, laptops or even smartphones in classrooms to offer new opportunities and innovative ways of learn. One of them is the use of virtual campus that offers new ways to evaluate students’ performance throughout the semester. In this study, a complete scheme of assessment based on rubrics and assessment guides trough Moodle is proposed. The experiment was carried out in a subject of the first year of the Computer Science degree, which has a high number of students. In addition, the students were surveyed to track their satisfaction levels with the changes on the subject.

In order to assure that each student acquires the required competences in Computer Programming, they also received feedback on their assignment in each session. In this way, the students could follow extra advices by lecturers to improve their assignments and revaluate them. So, acquaintance of competences is guaranteed if they have interest to keep learning.

Leading technologies like Data Mining on Sentiment Analysis were tested to analyse student’s satisfaction levels with the new assessment way. It was important to care about their feelings to perform any changes if they were necessary, to adjust the method. A reorganization of subject’s contents was performed at the same time, so this sentiment analysis was crucial in order to check if these changes were relevant to those who failed to pass the exam.

Surveys for Sentiment Analysis allowed to research student’s opinion in a polarity range [-1,1] where -1 indicates an awful opinion and 1 a great opinion. The algorithm evaluates each word with a value, so each sentence have a value that is calculated as the conjunction of all words. In consequence, adjectives have much more weight in the final result. This technique was applied to each student’s answers to each item of the surveys, in order to obtain the polarity. These data was gathered and treated with statistical techniques following a suitable methodology. The results showed that the students were satisfied with the new ways of assessment and with the continuous feedback.

Overall, it may be said that this Innovation Project has allowed to significantly increase students results and their satisfaction level with lectureres work. New technologies can help improve these thrilling results, so development of a smartphone application as a tool to automate the assessment process will be considered.

Keywords:

Innovation, technologies, assessment rubric, assessment guides, feedback, sentiment analysis.