PhD Proposal

Adaptive Learning Environments with Knowledge Representation and Social Interaction

Abstract

Assessment is essential for certification, regulation and feedback within the education process. Our research effort focus the last two features, and tries to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the students, in order to adapt assessment activities for better learning results.

The approach consists in designing a technological artefact for formative assessment with feedback during the learning process, to meet students demands for unique tests in order to effectively assess the learning outcome.

Most of the assessment tools are oriented to measure the student’s knowledge acquisition with a quantitative feedback result, whereas the idea behind this work is to use assessment as an analysis tool to measure, optimize the learning process, personalise and involve students, through an adaptive approach where each student can visualise the dynamic process of knowledge acquisition .

Research Question and Hypothesis

Our research is focused on how to use technology for formative assessment in formal learning contexts, to individually infer which knowledge each student is acquiring and identify the learning strengths and weaknesses. Our hypothesis is that students desire immediate results during the learning process and quantitative measures to differentiate themselves. Also there is an appealing interest in image representations, in line with visual thinkers, who use the emotional and creative part of the brain to organize information or thoughts in an intuitive manner

State-of-Art

Formative assessment is used to interconnect teaching with learning, measuring the learning outcome and enabling students to identify the difficulties. When a teacher is mentally constructing the test, there is a structuring domain process, associated to a set of activities. Somewhere, during this cognitive process, there is a pedagogical approach to organize the test and a personal strategy contextualized with that specific test.

Teachers use assessment tools for test construction but why not conceptualize the knowledge under study in one particular subject, and afterwards the system delivers adaptive tests to students. Additionally if test results are graphically visualised showing the different domains of competences or abilities, the students will understand better the assessment process, which will then influence future learning. One might think this is unnecessary, but our research considers students will handle better with the learning process if they get personalised, within reach tests and are aware of the improvements or deviations made between tests. When visualizing the knowledge acquired and missing, the students should react positively to overcome the identified difficulties. Also the teacher is not sacrificed with an individual monitoring process. In fact, the teacher will see it as an opportunity for improving teaching.

Acknowledgements

All this work has been closely supervised by Prof. Francisco José Restivo, partially supported by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through scholarship SFRH/BD/36206/2007 and specially attention to the Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory (LIACC) of Porto University for excellent working conditions.