Self-assessment in Vocabulary Tutoring

To individualize instruction, a tutor must infer which knowledge components the student knows and does not know. Self-assessments, by which the student directly reports to the tutor whether a certain item is known, are a fast measure of student knowledge. We investigate their use to initialize a learner model used to individualize instruction ESL vocabulary. Experimental results indicate that self-assessments can be useful measures of knowledge for use in a tutoring system for vocabulary. Self-assessments appear to be particularly reliable when learners claim that words are not known.