A USABILITY STUDY ON HOW NON-TECHNICAL STUDENTS INTERACT WITH A FREE-TEXT COMPUTER ASSISTED ASSESSMENT SYSTEM

Ismael Pascual-Nieto, Diana Pérez-Marín, Pilar Rodríguez

2009

Abstract

Willow is a free-text Computer Assisted Assessment system, which can automatically assess students' short written answers in Spanish or in English. Willow is based on the combination of techniques from Natural Language Processing and User Modelling to generate students’ conceptual models (i.e. a set of interconnected concepts of a certain area-of-knowledge associated with an estimated value that indicates how well each concept has been assimilated by the student) from the students’ free-text answers. In the past, the system was used by a group of students of an Operating Systems course within an Informatics degree. The results of that study suggested that the system was useful for these students. Nevertheless, our hypothesis was that the procedure implemented in Willow is also suitable for non-technical domains and, that students without computer training are able to use Willow without any technical difficulty. Therefore, we asked a group of voluntary students of a Pragmatics course within an English Studies program to use the system. The results achieved support our hypothesis that Willow can successfully be applied to a non-technical domain, and it can be used by non-technical students.

References

  1. Ishioka, T. and Kameda, M. (2004), 'Automated Japanese Essay Scoring System: JESS', Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications, 4-8.
  2. Mitchell, T.; Russell, T.; Broomhead, P. and Aldridge, N. (2002), Towards Robust Computerised Marking of Free-Text Responses, in 'Proceedings of the 6th Computer Assisted Assessment Conference'.
  3. Pérez-Marín, D. 2007. Adaptive Computer Assisted Assessment of free-text students' answers: an approach to automatically generate students' conceptual models, PhD thesis, Computer Science Department, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain.
  4. Sigel, I., ed. (1999), Development of mental representations: Theories and Applications, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey, U.S.A.
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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Pascual-Nieto I., Pérez-Marín D. and Rodríguez P. (2009). A USABILITY STUDY ON HOW NON-TECHNICAL STUDENTS INTERACT WITH A FREE-TEXT COMPUTER ASSISTED ASSESSMENT SYSTEM . In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-8111-82-1, pages 127-132. DOI: 10.5220/0001829001270132


in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu09,
author={Ismael Pascual-Nieto and Diana Pérez-Marín and Pilar Rodríguez},
title={A USABILITY STUDY ON HOW NON-TECHNICAL STUDENTS INTERACT WITH A FREE-TEXT COMPUTER ASSISTED ASSESSMENT SYSTEM},
booktitle={Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,},
year={2009},
pages={127-132},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0001829001270132},
isbn={978-989-8111-82-1},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,
TI - A USABILITY STUDY ON HOW NON-TECHNICAL STUDENTS INTERACT WITH A FREE-TEXT COMPUTER ASSISTED ASSESSMENT SYSTEM
SN - 978-989-8111-82-1
AU - Pascual-Nieto I.
AU - Pérez-Marín D.
AU - Rodríguez P.
PY - 2009
SP - 127
EP - 132
DO - 10.5220/0001829001270132