ATTeL 2011 Abstracts

Full Papers Short Papers
Full Papers
Paper Nr: 3
Title:

EXPERIENCES WITH ONLINE RESPONSE TECHNOLOGIES IN EDUCATION OF ENGINEERS
Authors:

Gabrielle Hansen-Nygård, Kjetil L. Nielsen, John B. Stav, Trond M. Thorseth and Ketil Arnesen
Abstract: This article reports experiences achieved during the development of open, online Student Response Services (SRS), and the emerging extension of these SRS into assessment services carried out on modern mobile devices. The evaluation results obtained from engineering classes in Norway that have used the online SRS, show very good results. The online SRS is flexible, intuitive, easy and fast to use. They may be used together with any kind of software. It is also reported how teachers are going to use a forthcoming and extended version of the SRS, as a tool for verification or elaborative feedback immediately after completion of tests and exams. This may be done for single students or groups of students. The development of the SRS and the forthcoming assessment system is co-funded by the EU-Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme.
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Paper Nr: 4
Title:

AN OPEN-ENDED ASSESSMENT PLATFORM IN A HOSTED E-LEARNING PORTAL
Authors:

Patrick Stalljohann
Abstract: Assessment activities play a central role in university courses. Assessment for learning during a semester can support students' performance and motivation, but needs a lot of time and effort for organizational issues. This paper presents a system which tries to combine generic applicability across different domains with the support of highly specialized processes and with the knowledge of specific domains. Portal Technologies are used to provide a university-wide hosting of assessment tools within a single architecture. The connection to cloud-services facilitates the integration of open assessment activities into formal assessment processes. A prototypical implementation demonstrates possible points of extension.
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Paper Nr: 6
Title:

FORMATIVE AND SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT OF CLASS DIAGRAMS - Development and Evaluation of a Prototype
Authors:

Narasimha Bolloju, Ken W. K. Lee and Probir K. Banerjee
Abstract: The computer-based assessment of student outputs in the field of software engineering is an area of interest amongst instructors and researchers. However, as previous efforts in this area have been mostly directed toward summative assessment, the formative feedback required for student learning has not received sufficient attention. This paper presents an approach for the formative and summative assessment of class diagrams used in systems development and reports the development, implementation and evaluation of a prototype assessment tool. The results from this empirical study demonstrate that the tool successfully provides formative feedback during the preparation of class diagrams, which helps to enhance student learning, and summative feedback that can be used as a proxy for manual summative assessment.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 2
Title:

MEASURING THE LEARNING PROGRESS IN A “LEARNING BY AUTHORING” SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES BASED ECOSYSTEM
Authors:

Ivo Hristov, Gennady Agre and Danail Dochev
Abstract: The paper presents the approaches and methodology for defining learning tasks and measurement of the learning outcomes in the learning by authoring environment. Assessment of the students work is made in three directions: measurement of relevance of the embedded multimedia files; assessment of the quality of the analysis made by the learner and visual appearance of entire multimedia document. The entire architecture of the project is briefly presented in order to position the tool that realizes the approaches.
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Paper Nr: 8
Title:

PCN: QUANTIFYING LEARNING ACTIVITY FOR ASSESSMENT BASED ON TIME-SERIES COMMENTS
Authors:

Kazumasa Goda and Tsunenori Mine
Abstract: Learning activity plays important role in enhancing one’s knowledge and skill. There are many ways to acquire and extract learning activities of students from their learning information; we focus on comments handwritten in their attendance sheets. It is easy for teachers to collect the sheets every class and for students to write their activities as comments. The sheets consequently provide time-series text data related to students; such the data are treasures because the comments and the questionnaire reflect their learning activities directly and indirectly. We propose a method called a PCN method for quantifying the comments into triple showing inferred learning activities student by student. Case studies illustrate the validity of the PCN method.
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Paper Nr: 10
Title:

PERSONALIZED ASSESSMENT OF HIGHER-ORDER THINKING SKILLS
Authors:

Christian Saul and Heinz-Dietrich Wuttke
Abstract: As our society moves from an information-based to an innovation-based environment, it is not just important what you know, but how you can use your own knowledge in order to solve problems and create new knowledge. Hence, assessment systems need to evaluate not just the students' factual knowledge, but also their problem-solving and reasoning strategies. This leads to a demand for the assessment of higher-order thinking skills (HOTS). This paper analyzes HOTS and possibilities for their measurement. As a result, adaptive assessment systems (AASs) are in response to the emerging need of personalization while assessing HOTS. AASs take student’s individual context, prior knowledge and preferences into account in order to personalize the assessment. This personalized support helps students develop HOTS. But, this paper also reveals several arising issues, which need to be addressed when measuring HOTS with AASs.
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Paper Nr: 12
Title:

REMOTE MANAGEMENT OF FACE-TO-FACE WRITTEN AUTHENTICATED THOUGH ANONYMOUS EXAMS
Authors:

Giampaolo Bella, Gianpiero Costantino, Lizzie Coles-Kemp and Salvatore Riccobene
Abstract: Authentication and anonymity are inherently difficult to combine. In case of face-to-face, written, university exams or public competitions, the candidates should be authenticated to prevent exchange of person, but the written exams they produce should be anonymous during the marking to ensure fairness of the marking. Complications rise still when the entire exam management should take place remotely, that is via the Internet, thus involving remote publication of marks and remote consultation/acceptance of those marks. This management would be useful, for example, also for the final, face-to-face, written exam concluding lectures delivered via electronic learning techniques. To our knowledge, no software currently exists beside ours to support this delicate combination of authentication and anonymity along with other typical exam preparation utilities. WATA2.0 (Bella et al., 2009) supports the management of Written Authenticated Though Anonymous exams non-remotely, that is by having WATA2.0 run locally on the examiner’s computer. Upgrading the system towards remote management turns out far from trivial because novel though fundamental security threats arise. These have required much more than SSL-secured connections to a remoteWATA server: a complete redesign. In particular, the identity of a candidate is no longer matched to a written exam through identical barcodes but, rather, through barcodes that decrypt via exclusive-OR to the candidate’s details. The new system, WATA3.0, is currently used at the University of Catania, and the migration from the previous version has been seamless. The innovative design of WATA3.0, its user experience, interface and implementation are presented.
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Paper Nr: 13
Title:

VERSATILE TOOL FOR COMPETENCE MANAGEMENT - An e-Portfolio Management System for Higher Education in Applied Sciences
Authors:

Jouni Huotari, Mirja Pulkkinen and Annu Niskanen
Abstract: In the line of outcome based education and transferability of credits, we study a Higher Education case and propose an e-Portfolio solution as a versatile tool for assessment tasks. The solution tackles the problems firstly, of accreditation of prior achievements from both institutional and experiential learning. Secondly, the developed tool carries the process of learning outcome definitions management (derived from the real employment world), and the learner self-assessment and self-reflection as well as the guidance and support for these. From the areas where the tool is applied, we present the learning unit Project management given at the ICT department in a university of applied sciences. The e-Portfolio management system, ePofo, supports the identification, assessment, recognition and accreditation of prior learning achievements and learning outcomes. Additionally, it is a tool to present the sectoral qualification requirements to the students, to derive learning needs and define the learning outcomes, thereby structuring the teaching. It also provides support for the learner’s own management of achievements and competences, and finally for presenting the profile to potential employers.
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Paper Nr: 15
Title:

ADAPTIVE ASSESSMENT BASED ON LEARNING STYLES AND STUDENT KNOWLEDGE LEVEL
Authors:

Boyan Bontchev and Dessislava Vassileva
Abstract: Traditionally, adaptive assessment methods and tools have been addressed only by application of computerized adaptive testing and item response theory as a key instrument for practical construction of adaptive test assessments. The present paper tries to give a broader view of adaptive assessment, where tests are not the only instrument for evaluation of learners outcomes gained during a course. It shows how adaptive task-based assessment may be combined with traditional adaptive test assessment for achieving better results and higher student satisfaction. Various types of tasks have been found suitable for adaptive assessment based on learning styles and student knowledge level. By means of constructing course storyboard with several branches for different learning styles, it has been proven that games, essay, observation, comparative analysis tasks, projects and auto-generated tests may be used successfully for a complex adaptive assessment. There have been explored approaches such as self-, peer- and teacher- (i.e., host) assessment by using appropriate types of estimable learning objects.
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Paper Nr: 5
Title:

MSL_AR TOOLKIT: AR WITH INTERACTIVE FEATURE FOR NEXT GENERATION EDUCATION
Authors:

Jinwook Shim, Jonghoon Seo and Tack-don Han
Abstract: We describe an authoring tool for Augmented Reality (AR) contents. In recent years there have been a number of frameworks proposed for developing Augmented Reality (AR) applications. This paper describes an authoring tool for Augmented Reality (AR) application with interactive features. We developed the AR authoring tool which provides Interactive features that we can perform the education service project and participate it actively for the participating education service. This paper provides learning and teaching models for next generation digital textbook which Augmented Reality interactions between teacher and learner. The proposed method of this paper is applied to educational contents and we found positive effect which is supported by statistical experiments.
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Paper Nr: 11
Title:

DESIGNING WITH AND FOR THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED: VOCABULARY, SPELLING AND THE SCREEN READER
Authors:

Verena Stein, Robert Neßelrath, Jan Alexandersson and Johannes Tröger
Abstract: For visually impaired people it is both usable and effective to study foreign language vocabulary and spelling with an auditory e-learning device. Amongst visually impaired computer users there is a growing preference for the screen reader over the braille line. Unfortunately, this exposes them even less to the written word. However, spelling is considered one of the biggest challenges for visually impaired people who study a foreign language. Existing computer-assisted vocabulary learning software is often designed for sighted users and information is lost when they are accessed with a screen reader. This paper discusses the successful evaluation of a prototype of an auditory vocabulary and spelling trainer (AVoS) and explains how essential it is to involve the target group in the development process. The paper presents the results of an online survey amongst 88 adults with visual impairments in Germany. The survey clearly indicates who would benefit from an auditory vocabulary and spelling trainer and which features would make it usable.
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Paper Nr: 14
Title:

TOWARD A NEW MODEL FOR ASSESSING QUALITY TEACHING PROCESSES IN E-LEARNING
Authors:

Neila Rjaibi and Latifa Ben Arfa Rabai
Abstract: Quality in e-learning encompasses many criteria such as curricula, students, teaching methods, learning platform and teachers. In this paper, we intend to improve the quality of e-learning educational by proposing a new assessment model focusing on e-learning processes based on student’s perceptions. A literature review has shown that there is no detailed e-learning assessment process. For these reasons, in this paper, we propose to define then refine and finally evaluate a detailed e-learning assessment model by listing its respective assessment criteria which lead to increase student’s satisfaction.
Paper Nr: 17
Title:

ADAPTIVE ASSESSMENT BASED ON DECISION TREES AND DECISION RULES
Authors:

Irena Nančovska Šerbec, Alenka Žerovnik and Jože Rugelj
Abstract: In the e-learning environment we use adaptive assessment based on machine learning models called decision trees and decision rules. Adaptation of testing procedure relies on performance, current knowledge of test participants, on the goals of educators and on the properties of knowledge shown by participants. The paper presents sequential process of adaptive assessment where human educator or intelligent tutoring system uses different adaptive rules, based on machine learning models, to make formative assessments.
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