An Automated Grading and Feedback System for a Computer Literacy Course

Computer Science departments typically offer a computer literacy course that targets a general lay audience. At Appalachian State University, this course is CS1410 - Introduction to Computer Applications. computer literacy courses have students work with various desktop and web-based software applications, including standard office applications. CS1410 strives to have students use well known applications in new and challenging ways, as well as exposing them to some unfamiliar applications. These courses can draw large enrollments which impacts efficient and consistent grading. This thesis describes the development and successful deployment of the Automated Grading And Feedback (AGAF) system for CS1410. Specifically, a suite of automated grading tools targeting the different types of CS1410 assignments has been built. The AGAF system tools have been used on actual CS1410 submissions and the resulting grades were verified. AGAF tools exist for Microsoft Office assignments requiring students to upload a submission file. Another AGAF tool accepts a student “online text submission” where the text encodes the URL of a Survey Monkey survey and a blog. Other CS1410 assignments require students to upload an image file. AGAF can process images in multiple ways, including decoding of a QR two-dimensional barcode and identification of an expected image pattern

Multi-Target Prediction: A Unifying View on Problems and Methods

Multi-target prediction (MTP) is concerned with the simultaneous prediction of multiple target variables of diverse type. Due to its enormous application potential, it has developed into an active and rapidly expanding research field that combines several subfields of machine learning, including multivariate regression, multi-label classification, multi-task learning, dyadic prediction, zero-shot learning, network inference, and matrix completion. In this paper, we present a unifying view on MTP problems and methods. First, we formally discuss commonalities and differences between existing MTP problems. To this end, we introduce a general framework that covers the above subfields as special cases. As a second contribution, we provide a structured overview of MTP methods. This is accomplished by identifying a number of key properties, which distinguish such methods and determine their suitability for different types of problems. Finally, we also discuss a few challenges for future research

The Science Studio – A Workshop Approach to Introductory Physical Science

This paper describes the Science Studio, an innovative workshop approach for instruction in a physical science course that combines aspects of traditional lecture and laboratory. The target audience for this introductory course is non-science majors, including prospective teachers. An inquiry-based, technology-rich learning environment has been created to allow students hands-on, in-depth exploration of topics in physics, and earth and space science. Course philosophy, course development, and sample activities are described in this paper, along with outcomes from a project-wide evaluation of the Virginia Collaborative for Excellence in the Preparation of Teachers (VCEPT), an investigation of change in student attitudes and the lasting impact of the studio model at Norfolk State University

Framing automatic grading techniques for open-ended questionnaires responses. A short survey

The assessment of students' performances is one of the essential components of teaching activities, and it poses different challenges to teachers and instructors, especially when considering the grading of responses to open-ended questions (i.e., short-answers or essays). Open-ended tasks allow a more in-depth assessment of students' learning levels, but their evaluation and grading are time-consuming and prone to subjective bias. For these reasons, automatic grading techniques have been studied for a long time, focusing mainly on short-answers rather than long essays. Given the growing popularity of Massive Online Open Courses and the shifting from physical to virtual classrooms environments due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the adoption of questionnaires for evaluating learning performances has rapidly increased. Hence, it is of particular interest to analyze the recent effort of researchers in the development of techniques designed to grade students' responses to open-ended questions. In our work, we consider a systematic literature review focusing on automatic grading of open-ended written assignments. The study encompasses 488 articles published from 1984 to 2021 and aims at understanding the research trends and the techniques to tackle essay automatic grading. Lastly, inferences and recommendations are given for future works in the Learning Analytics field