Improving Course Content While Creating Customized Assessment and Support at the Conceptual Level

Abstract

We present a system that utilizes a wide variety of available assessment information to automatically analyze students' understanding at a conceptual level and offer relevant automated support to teachers and students. This support includes interactive visualization of the conceptual knowledge assessment, individualized suggestions for resources to improve areas of weakness, and suggestions for dynamic student groups for inclass activities. This system differs from prior related work in that the basis for analysis and feedback is entirely customized to the individual instructors' course content. We discuss how the system is configured for each course, and provide evidence that this configuration process helps instructors improve their course content. We then provide detailed descriptions of how the system performs analysis and offers support including suggesting resources for students and creating dynamic groups within a class. Finally, we discuss the potential benefits provided by this system and how the system is being applied to six different computer science courses currently.