Among the possible forms of test, open-ended question has a non-replaceable role in assessing
high-level thinking in science education. However, teachers usually hesitate to give
this type of tests because of the grading efforts involved unless the grading can be processed
automatically by the computer. Recently, there has been much research on automatic text
processing in the area of language learning and writing [1] and science education [2]. The
system in [2] was further customized into an intelligent tutoring system, called VIBRANT,
that can provide feedback to the students according to the answers that have been inputted
so far [3]. In this system, the students were asked to answer an open-ended question in the
form of ideation and explanation. When an idea or explanation is entered, appropriate
comments or feedbacks are provided automatically according to the established user model.
However, this system requires a model of domain expert to compute the score for the students.
In addition, only the overall collection of answers counts without regard to the course
of how they were inputted.
Relation:
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computers in Education
