Determining What the Student Understands - Assessment in an Unscaffolded Environment

摘要

Assessment of skills and process knowledge is difficult and quite different from assessing knowledge of content. Many assessment systems use either multiple choice questions or other frameworks that provide a significant amount of scaffolding and this can influence the results. One reason for this is that they are easy to administer and the answers can be automatically graded. This paper describes an assessment tool that does not provide scaffolding (and therefore hints) and yet is able to automatically grade the free form answers through the use of domain knowledge heuristics. The tool has been developed for a tutoring system in the domain of red black trees (a data structure in computer science) and has been evaluated on three semesters of students in a computer science course.