Adaptive Navigation for Self-assessment Quizzes

Web-based parameterized quizzes provide teachers and students with several advantages as the technology for self-assessment. However, the effect of these advantages is strongly reduced, if a student does not receive enough support and cannot see her/his progress during the course. We have developed the system QuizGuide, which attempts to solve this problem by navigating students through the quiz material of the course in adaptive way. Architecture, interface and plans of future system development are described here. The paper also presents first results of system evaluation. 1 Web-based quizzes as the technology for self-assessment Starting from the development of first Web-based educational systems, several successful technologies for online knowledge evaluation have been proposed [1, 2]. However, web-based quizzes have always played the leading role because of two main reasons. First, it is relatively easy to organize all three main stages of the question “life cycle” [2]: authorization, delivery/presentation, and assessment/feedback generation, in comparison to such classes of web-based systems as online simulation, collaboration support system or web-based ITS. Second, this technology inherits from traditional in-class quizzes; it is natural for both teacher and students to use it for knowledge assessment in the new conditions of web-based and web-enhanced education. With the transfer of question material to the web such context of using quizzes as the self-assessment of student knowledge took on a special significance. Two trends in modern education increasing the teacher burden have appeared: the courses become more intensive, and the number of students grows (especially due to the distance and continuous education). This leads to the lack of traditional formative feedback that student can get in class. Web-based technologies for self-assessment, such as webbased quizzes, can help to solve this problem by providing students with meaningful information about their progress through the course and potential weaknesses [3]. Another strength of self-assessment technology is the self-motivation of students [4]. In our evaluation study [5] performed on QuizPACK we analyzed the subjective students evaluation of the systems. It was based on the questionnaires, filled by 1 This work is done by the author as a part of his graduate study (The authors' research adviser is Peter Brusilovsky). students after the term period of using system. More then 80% of students using QuizPACK reported positive attitude to it and high interest in taking online selfassessment quizzes. The pedagogical value of self-assessment quizzes has been confirmed by the number of papers. Regression analysis performed in [5] showed positive dependency between student performance in class and both the amount of students' work with selfassessment quizzes and their success (percentage of positive answers). Study reported in [6] showed statistically significant evidence of improvement in learning course material when students were using online self-assessment quizzes. 2. QuizPACK – parameterized quizzes However, to possess all mentioned advantages in full degree, a system for selfassessment needs fairly large number of quizzes. Otherwise, students will hardly benefit from it, since familiar static question-answer pairs cannot reflect the real student’s progress as well as initiate additional motivation. The alternative to the large library of static question is the parameterized questions. This way has been used in our QuizPACK system (see Fig. 1). The architecture and interface of QuizPACK are described in details in [7]; the evaluation of the system is given in [5]. Below we provide the brief overview of the main features of QuizPACK.