SciLAF: Scientific-based Learning Assessment Framework for Student Knowledge Tracking

该方案解决了在高师生比例的基础工程课程中评估单个学生知识的基本挑战。目标是：开发一个计算评估框架，使其易于集成到教师的日常工作中，以跟踪学生的知识，建议补救干预措施，并指导未来的考试。其基本原理是，学生的个人知识是一种假设/模型，需要用科学的方法进行检验。类似地，评估工具只是用来发现学生对特定概念掌握程度的实验。这很自然地符合概率方法论，如形式化科学方法的贝叶斯推理。采用的主要方法是通过建立基于贝叶斯网络的学生知识模型来跟踪个别学生的进步。本提案解决了构建和使用知识模型来评估学习的一个开放的基本问题，即如何将课程结构与知识模型联系起来，以及如何使用评估数据为模型提供信息。所提出的方法强调概念清单的作用，为贝叶斯网络模型的构建提供信息，并从这些模型中提取信息，为未来的考试提供信息问题。为了方便教师使用和更广泛地采用，软件构件将在开源许可下提供，框架的功能将通过开发原型插件集成到广泛使用的学习管理系统中。该提案的教育和推广方面包括培训参与者有效的教育策略和指导未来的教师。

This proposal is addressing the fundamental challenge of assessing individual student's knowledge in cornerstone engineering classes with high student-to-faculty ratios. The goal is to: develop a computational assessment framework that easily integrates into an instructor's routine efforts to track student knowledge, suggest remedial interventions, and guide future examinations. The rationale is that individual student knowledge is a hypothesis/model that needs to be tested using the scientific method. Similarly, assessment instruments are just experiments to discover how well a student masters specific concepts. This fits naturally with probabilistic methodologies such as the Bayesian inference that formalize the scientific method.The main approach taken is to track the progress of individual students by developing student knowledge models based on Bayesian networks. This proposal addresses an open fundamental problem in constructing and using knowledge models to assess learning, namely how to relate curricular structure to knowledge models and how to inform the models using assessment data. The proposed methodology emphasizes the role of concept inventories to inform the construction of Bayesian networks models and to extract information from these models to suggest informative questions for future examinations. To facilitate ease of use and broader adoption by faculty, the software artifacts will be made available under open source licenses and the functionality of the framework will be integrated within a widely used learning management system through the development of a prototype plugin. The education and outreach aspects of this proposal include training participants in effective educational strategies and mentoring of future faculty.