Impact of Auto-evaluation Tests as Part of the Continuous Evaluation in Programming Courses

The continuous evaluation allows for the assessment of the progressive assimilation of concepts and the competences that must be achieved in a course. There are several ways to implement such contin uous evaluation system. We propose auto-evaluation tests as a valuable tool for the student to judge his level of knowledge. Furthermore, these tests are also used as a small part of the continuous evaluation process, encouraging students to learn the concepts seen in the course, as they have the feeling that the time dedicated to this study will have an assured reward, binge able to answer correctly the questions in the continuous evaluation exams. New technologies are a great aid to improve the auto evaluation experience both for the students and the teachers. In this research work we have compared the results obtained in courses where auto-evaluation tests were provided against courses where they were not provided, showing how the tests improve a set of quality metrics in the results of the courseMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2017-88209-C2-

Early experiences of computer‐aided assessment and administration when teaching computer programming

This paper describes early experiences with the Ceilidh system currently being piloted at over 30 institutions of higher education. Ceilidh is a course‐management system for teaching computer programming whose core is an auto‐assessment facility. This facility automatically marks students programs from a range of perspectives, and may be used in an iterative manner, enabling students to work towards a target level of attainment. Ceilidh also includes extensive course‐administration and progress‐monitoring facilities, as well as support for other forms of assessment including short‐answer marking and the collation of essays for later hand‐marking. The paper discusses the motivation for developing Ceilidh, outlines its major facilities, then summarizes experiences of developing and actually using it at the coal‐face over three years of teaching

Academic achievement in public higher education quality – A study on the effects of teachers’ commitment, teaching and evaluation methodologies in Nursing and Management degrees students.

The huge development of science and technology and the political, social and economic changes that characterize post-modern societies, demand from education systems a quality formation for all citizens. The great challenge of the XXI century in education is not only to ensure the acquisition of a range of varied and current competencies, but also to guarantee the quality of learning. Therefore, the quality of education is a major concern to governments, politicians, academics and researchers and has been an issue widely discussed in scientific meetings and studied in several education research programs in different countries in the Western world. The results of research on education quality show a positive correlation between students’ academic performance and education quality. However, we must go further, it is necessary to research quality indicators, to understand how students perceive education quality. In order to achieve these goals, we developed an exploratory study with students from different higher education institutions in Portugal. Data sampling consists in students of different courses of higher education in Alentejo (Portugal). Data collection was conducted through a survey questionnaire. This work presents the analysis of students’ representations of quality, in Nursing and Management degrees in the University of Évora and in Beja Polytechnic Institute, under three dimensions: teacher’s commitment, teaching methodology and evaluation methodologies, as to relate the influence of these variables with the academic success of students

Building Student Success From the Ground Up: A Case Study of an Achieving the Dream College

Achieving the Dream teaches community colleges to use student data to improve programming and student success. Since participating, Guilford Technical Community College in North Carolina has become a data-driven, success-oriented institution and has seen promising trends in student achievement. This study offers lessons for other colleges undertaking similar institutional reform

Tea: A High-level Language and Runtime System for Automating Statistical Analysis

Though statistical analyses are centered on research questions and hypotheses, current statistical analysis tools are not. Users must first translate their hypotheses into specific statistical tests and then perform API calls with functions and parameters. To do so accurately requires that users have statistical expertise. To lower this barrier to valid, replicable statistical analysis, we introduce Tea, a high-level declarative language and runtime system. In Tea, users express their study design, any parametric assumptions, and their hypotheses. Tea compiles these high-level specifications into a constraint satisfaction problem that determines the set of valid statistical tests, and then executes them to test the hypothesis. We evaluate Tea using a suite of statistical analyses drawn from popular tutorials. We show that Tea generally matches the choices of experts while automatically switching to non-parametric tests when parametric assumptions are not met. We simulate the effect of mistakes made by non-expert users and show that Tea automatically avoids both false negatives and false positives that could be produced by the application of incorrect statistical tests.Comment: 11 page