SBIR Phase I: Automated Performance Assessment Tools

9860581新的教育改革呼吁制定具有挑战性的标准，强调解决现实世界的问题的技能，这导致了评估的范式转变，转向支持这些技能的测量的更真实的形式。在真实性评价运动中，一个重要的推动力是表现评价，即基于学生执行现实任务的评价。这个由Research Development Corporation发起的小型企业创新研究第一阶段项目旨在开发一个用于展示和评分绩效任务的自动化系统。该系统将使用人工智能作为一种手段，使评分更及时、更具成本效益和更可靠。Research Development Corporation建议，通过在模拟问题环境中创建性能任务，并使用智能辅导系统和评估技术来自动评估学生，可以解决大规模评估中固有的主观评分过程中的劳动强度、成本和不一致问题。具体地说，该项目将使用模拟科学实验作为性能任务，为高中科学生成一个自动成绩评估系统，并将通过将该技术的评分与受过培训的教师使用相同评分规则进行的评分进行比较，来评估该技术的可靠性。Research Development Corporation提出了一种创新的自动化工具，用于快速评估学生，这可能会对学生评估、学习过程和教授科学的方式产生重大影响。能够很容易地衡量知识的应用和综合方面的收获，对于促进我国学校中更高层次的思维和内容的应用的价值至关重要。

9860581 New educational reforms calling for challenging standards that emphasize real world problem solving skills have caused a paradigm shift in assessment to more authentic forms that support measurement of these skills. Within the authentic assessment movement, an important thrust is performance assessment; namely assessment based on students performing realistic tasks. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project from Research Development Corporation seeks to develop an automated system for presenting and scoring performance tasks. The system will use artificial intelligence as a means to make scoring more timely, cost effective, and reliable. Research Development Corporation proposes that the problems of labor intensiveness, costs, and inconsistencies across an inherently subjective rating process in scoring large scale assessments can be addressed by creating performance tasks within a simulated problem environment and using intelligent tutoring system and assessment technologies to automatically assess the students. Specifically, the project will generate an automated performance assessment system for high school science using simulated science experiments as performance tasks, and it will evaluate the reliability of the technology by comparing ratings made by the technology to ratings made by trained teachers using the same scoring rubrics. Research Development Corporation proposes an innovative automated tool for the rapid assessment of students that has potential for a significant impact on student assessment, the learning process, and on the way science is taught. Being able to easily measure gains in the applications and synthesis of knowledge is crucial to promoting the value of higher level thinking and application of content in our Nation's schools.