Can We Get Better Assessment from a Tutoring System Compared to Traditional Paper Testing? Can We Have Our Cake (Better Assessment) and Eat It Too (Student Learning During the Test)?

Abstract

Dynamic assessment (DA) has been advocated as an interactive approach to conducting assessments to students in the learning systems. Sternberg and others proposed to give students tests to see how much assistance it takes a student to learn a topic; and to use as a measure of their learning gain. To researchers in the ITS community, it comes as no surprise that measuring how much assistance a student needs to complete a task successfully is probably a good indicator of this lack of knowledge. However, a cautionary note is that conducting DA takes more time than simply administering regular test items to students. In this paper, we report a study analyzing 40-minutes data of totally 1,392 students from two school years. The result suggests that for the purpose of assessing student performance, it is more efficient for students to take DA than just having practice items.

Keywords: Dynamic assessment, assessment in learning system.