Measuring the knowledge of students in online courses poses a number of challenges. Researchers from the Higher School of Economics and the University of Leuven made improvements to the model for assessing academic achievements and published their results in the journal Heliyon.

Several systemic factors make it difficult for the developers of online courses to assess students' proficiency accurately.

First, the average 10-15 test questions are too few to produce an accurate and reliable measure of knowledge. Second, the use of multiple-choice questions leads to guessing and a distortion of the results. Third, frequent use of the same set of correct answers as a measure of proficiency makes it difficult to compare students when the test is updated even slightly.

Researchers of the Higher School of Economics and the University of Leuven managed to solve these problems by expanding the classic Rasch model with additional parameters.

'First, our expanded approach includes the effect of multiple attempts, making it possible to distinguish between students who guess and those who know the answers,' said HSE Centre for Psychometrics in eLearning Head Dmitry Abbakumov.

'Second, because the knowledge metrics obtained with this expanded approach are expressed on a single scale, they can be compared even when the test questions are changed significantly. And finally, we calculate metrics based not only on test results, but also by taking into account the student's experience - their activity when watching videos and performance in hands-on sessions - providing a more comprehensive understanding of the student's competence.'

In the future, the approach proposed by the researchers could be used in assessment engines on educational platforms to obtain more accurate measurements of students' knowledge. And the metrics could be built into the navigation and recommendation solutions in digital education.

Research paper

Related Links
National Research University Higher School of Economics
All About Human Beings and How We Got To Be Here

Tweet

Thanks for being here; We need your help. The SpaceDaily news network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain. With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords. Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year. If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.
SpaceDaily Contributor $5 Billed Once credit card or paypal		SpaceDaily Monthly Supporter $5 Billed Monthly paypal only

Peering into Little Foot's 3.67 million-year-old brain
Johannesburg, South Africa (SPX) Dec 19, 2018
First ever endocast reconstruction of the nearly complete brain of the hominin known as Little Foot reveals a small brain combining ape-like and human-like features. MicroCT scans of the Australopithecus fossil known as Little Foot shows that the brain of this ancient human relative was small and shows features that are similar to our own brain and others that are closer to our ancestor shared with living chimpanzees. While the brain features structures similar to modern humans - such as an ... read more