SBIR Phase II: An End User Authoring Tool for Open and Intelligent Technology-Enhanced Assessments.

SBIR第二阶段的工作将创建变革性的开放工具，以使中等和中等后教育基础科目的高质量评估（问题）能够负担得起。在线学生受众的爆炸式增长、开放教育资源（OER）的快速增长以及支持个人学习者的需求，正在创造对数字评估的前所未有的需求。今天的评估创作工具由大型组织控制，需要高级技能和具有限制性协作功能的专有评估交付平台。这种不平等在技术支持的评估（TEA）方面尤为明显，这些评估是复杂的数字评估，可以进行更深入的学习。这一努力将通过创建直观的最终用户工具，使创作和共享TEA的过程民主化，这些工具将使没有高级技术技能的教育工作者能够创作和共享TEA。这有可能打破现状，使教育工作者能够利用突破性的工具负责评估的创建和分发，这些工具可以轻松编写和分发复杂的TEA，而不受专有评估系统的限制。最终，这将通过引发围绕评估需求的点对点市场的演变，大规模地增强教育工作者的能力，并影响中等和高等教育环境中的数十万学习者。第一个是最终用户工具，将大大减少编写技术强化评估所需的时间和专门知识。该工具将通过使用编程结构的符号表示来促进直观的TEA创作。第二项创新是技术增强评估的新标准，使其可用于任何交付平台，从而使评估与平台无关。这一努力也将推动创作的前沿超越个人评估，以创建适应性评估途径，为不同的学习者提供个性化。它将探索新的技术，包括将TEA表示为智能和便携式对象，通过应用程序编程接口与不同的评估平台进行互操作。研究将深入了解拟议的创新如何使TEAs的创作更有效，同时降低教育工作者的技能障碍，以及这些TEAs在基础学科中有效激发学生推理和思维过程的程度。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This SBIR Phase II effort will create transformative open tools to enable affordable access at scale to high quality assessments (problems & questions) for foundational subjects in secondary and post-secondary education. The explosion of online student audiences, rapid growth of Open Educational Resources (OER), and the need to support individual learners are creating an unprecedented demand for digital assessments. Assessment authoring tools today are controlled by large organizations, require advanced skills and proprietary assessment delivery platforms with restrictive collaboration features. This inequity is particularly pronounced with respect to technology-enabled assessments (TEAs) which are sophisticated, digital assessments that enable deeper learning. This effort will democratize the process of authoring and sharing TEAs through the creation of intuitive end user tools that will enable educators without advanced technical skills to author and share TEAs. This has the potential to disrupt the status quo by empowering educators to take charge of the assessment creation and distribution landscape with ground-breaking tools that enable easy authoring and distribution of sophisticated TEAs without being restricted by a proprietary assessment system. Eventually, this will empower educators at scale by triggering the evolution of a peer-to-peer marketplace around the need for assessments, and impact hundreds of thousands of learners in secondary and tertiary education settings.This project will follow through on two principal innovations. The first is an end-user tool that will dramatically reduce the time and expertise required to author technology-enhanced assessments. The tool will facilitate intuitive authoring of TEAs by using symbolic representation of programming constructs. The second innovation is a new standard for representation of technology-enhanced assessments that makes them usable in any delivery platform, thus making the assessments platform-neutral. This effort will also advance the frontiers of authoring beyond individual assessments to the creation of adaptive assessment pathways that will provide personalization for diverse learners. It will explore novel technologies including the representation of TEAs as intelligent and portable objects that are interoperable with disparate assessment platforms through application programming interfaces. The research studies will provide insight into how the proposed innovations can make authoring of TEAs more efficient while lowering the skills barrier for educators, and the degree to which such TEAs are effective in eliciting student reasoning and thinking processes in foundational subjects. This will be achieved through a combination of usability and validation studies in partnership with secondary and post-secondary educators drawn from different institutions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.