A Model of Formative Automatic Assessment and Interactive Feedback for STEM

Abstract

Formative assessment is a practice aimed to enhance teaching and learning and to develop self-regulation. Among the strategies for activating formative assessment, the provision of feedback is one of the most studied: good feedback helps close the gap between actual and desired performance and it promotes selfregulation. Automatic Assessment Systems can improve the practice of formative assessment, especially for the immediacy of feedback and the flexible solutions for questioning. In this context, the Department of Mathematics of the University of Turin has developed a model for automatic formative assessment using an automatic assessment system suitable for STEM disciplines. The key features of the model, grounded on the models from the literature, are: availability, algorithmic questions, open answers, immediate feedback, interactive feedback, and contextualization. These are detailed and discussed through evidence gained from three experimentations, involving the total number of 553 students. In particular, it emerges that the use of interactive feedback ensures that students process the information from the feedback and use it to improve their performance, thus solving the major problem raised in the literature that feedback are not useful when students do not read them.

From Standardized Assessment to Automatic Formative Assessment for Adaptive Teaching

“…In a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), formative assessment can be easily automatized in order to provide students immediate and personalized feedback. Using Moebius AAS (https://www.digitaled.com/products/assessment/), our research group has designed a model for the formative automatic assessment for STEM, based on the following principles (Barana, Conte, et al, 2018):…”

Online Tutoring Through an Integrated Platform to Support Learning Mathematics at Lower Secondary School

“…To recover the difficulties in Mathematics, teachers and schools, but also students and parents, devote a lot of resources in terms of time and actions taken. The University of Turin has designed, studied and developed innovative methodologies for the reduction of school failures, such as:  the use of a Virtual Learning Environment for collaborative learning and online tutoring (Barana & Marchisio, 2016;Brancaccio et al, 2019;Fissore et al, 2019);  the use of an ACE for interactive materials and for problem solving (Brancaccio et al, 2015);  the use of an AAS for the construction of online tests with interactive feedback for recovery and enhancement (Barana et al, 2018a;Barana et al, 2018b). The use of these new methodologies allows to propose a recovery intervention different from the traditional one with the use of new technologies (Turrentine and Macdonald, 2006;Ferrari, 2011).…”

Advantages of Using Automatic Formative Assessment for Learning Mathematics

“…Using Maple TA AAS, the Department of Mathematics of the University of Turin has designed a model for the automatic formative assessment for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines, based on the following principles [22]:…”

“…The Department of Mathematics of the University of Turin (Italy) has been active for years in the research on automatic formative assessment. In light of the theoretical framework illustrated above, the Department has started a research project aimed to study the effectiveness of the learning approach based on the model of AFA and interactive feedback previously developed [22] in Mathematics education at lower secondary level. Our first goal was the study of the effectiveness of the AFA model on the point of view of learning, in order to understand the advantages of using these kinds of online activities for improving learning results.…”