Abstract:

Current practices evaluation systems, including the automatic ones, often present one problem: when students deliver a practice, they don’t know neither the qualification until a time has elapsed, nor the mistakes they have made it, without the possibility of marking them. This situation can cause several negative effects to the student. Among them we can distinguish unmotivation, because if students don’t obtain answer to the delivery of the practice on a short period of time, they will arrive to lose the motivation to pass these practices. This loss of motivation could be extended to the theory of the subject; it can also produce abandonment by the fact of not being informed in a reasonable period of time, as they don’t get a fast reward to the first effort; and, finally, ignorance, because obviously if students deliver a work and they don’t know if it’s right, or they haven’t the possibility to check their mistakes, when they do another task later on, they won’t have the security of doing their work well, because they will have possibly forgotten the way they did it.

We need to get the students motivated and consequently, making them learn and pass. In order to solve all these problems, and with our experience about our work and contributions in teaching search projects concerning to Higher Education European Space, the authors of this paper have organized and performed the assessment of practices in the subject “Computational Logic” – first year in Computer Science Engineering - , through an automatic system of delivery and instant evaluation via web. This system combines an improved methodology of evaluation and an automatic hundred percent objective evaluator available 24 hours a day. It presents many advantages for the student (instant update of the qualification to have a continuous evaluation, immediate feedback to mark possible mistakes, personalized work pace and individual responsibility in their own learning process to get the desired qualification, and finally fixed rules of evaluation to obtain objectivity and equality in the conditions of marking) as for the teacher (more dedication to teach and not to mark, continuous monitoring of the student’s work, evenly distribution of the rhythm of the class to dedicate more time to personalized attention). The results of the first version show a higher motivation both from students and from teachers.

The automatic online control system consists of a local web for the distribution and delivery of practices, and contains several software applications: data base with information about all the students registered, distribution of different practises for each student, collection of practises in a timely manner, notification of the qualification at the same moment of delivery, running reports and mistakes, information of the current situation and their evolution in the implementation of the exercises, and statistics both for students and teachers. It also allows the teacher getting in touch with their students via email.

Keywords:

real-time, motivation, feedback.