Confidence Based Assessment

1.The Importance of Confidence in improving Educational Outcomes

25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Authors:

i. Timothy M. Adams, Chief Academic officer, SatoriEDU ii. Gary w. Ewen, D.S.L, Professor of Management, Colorado Christian University.

About the paper: This paper discusses the importance of confidence of a student upon the knowledge he/she gains from a certain learning material. This paper also discusses the one dimensional assessment technique that lags in eliminating guesswork factor in any assessment result. Thus the authors also explain the importance of introducing another dimension i.e. confidence level in assessment system of any learning material/object.

The guesswork

James Bruno , professor of education at ULSA, examined this problem and advised that there should be way to measure the level of confidence along with knowledge simultaneously. His research led to the creation of Confidence-Based Assessment and Learning methodology ,originally referred to as Information Reference Testing or IRT.[ref ].

Figure:1

In the above figure ,both the knowledge scale as well as the confidence metric are measured simultaneously determining the quality of the information gathered by the student and dividing the knowledge accordingly into each quadrant. And the quadrant determines on which learning materials a student should be focused.

According to Dr. Bruno’s approach a student must choose a confidence level while choosing answer for a question (as shown in figure 2 below).

Figure:2

By this, the confidence based learning gives an approach to find out the quality of the knowledge and help a student with better guidance in his curriculum.

2. Design of an LMS for Confidence Based Learning

5th International Technology, Education and Development Conference (2011), Valencia, Spain.

2.1. Authors:

i. R. Chatterjee, National Institute of Technical Teachers’ Training and Research(INDIA) ii. S. Mukherjee, Bengal Institute Of Technology(INDIA) iii. R. DasGupta , National Institute of Technical Teachers’ Training and

Now in present scenario a number of LMS are available in market and are designed for conventional web based teaching-learning system but they cannot be directly used for CBL.

Thus in this paper, the authors have expressed the design requirements and several diagrams for CBL LMS using UML based design technique .The proposed LMS aims for identification of learners’ lack of knowledge, finding necessary learning objects to supplement the knowledge gaps, providing web based learning facility to the learner, reassesses the candidates etc.

Before the authors discussed about the proposed LMS , they also have discussed about the phases(Diagnose , Prescribe and Learn) of CBL along with the advantages and disadvantages of CBL.

Next the Uml Design of the LMS for CBL are given as follows.

 Use-case diagram:

The use case diagram has three actors as learner, system administrator and content developer and six use cases as shown in figure below. Diagnosis phase of the CBL is broken into two activities, namely assessment and deficiency diagnosis. Prescription and Learning are the two use cases representing prescribe and learn components, respectively. [ref]

Figure : Use case diagram for LMS using