Feedback Personalization as Prerequisite for
Assessing Higher-order Thinking Skills
Christian Saul, [christian.saul@idmt.fraunhofer.de],
Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, Germany
Heinz-Dietrich Wuttke, [dieter.wuttke@tu-ilmenau.de],
Faculty Informatics and Automation, Germany
Abstract
Personalized support for students becomes even more important when learning takes place in open and dynamic learning and information network environments. It is believed that personalization in education raises the motivation and interests of the students, which are critical success factors in the learning as well as in the assessment process. Feedback plays a central role in the assessment process, because it provides information about the current areas of strength and weakness of the students. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of feedback personalization in four adaptive assessment systems (AASs) namely SIETTE, PASS, CosyQTI and iAdaptTest. The results show that these systems are far from being able to adapt the feedback to the students’ individual context, prior knowledge and preferences, because personalization is still insufficiently implemented or even not addressed. Reasons for that could be found in analyzing the thinking skills assessed. As shown, they only address lower-order thinking skills and are not appropriate for assessing higher-order thinking skills. The findings of the analysis are meant as a starting point for future work aiming at implementing a new AAS providing personalized assessment. Moreover, the proposed 3-dimensional feedback classification helps identifying and addressing the potential of personalization that feedback actually has.
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