Intelligent Knowledge Assessment Tool

Abstract

The paper presents a novel approach regarding adaptive and intelligent knowledge assessment using concept maps. The paper describes the knowledge assessment software system that has twofold goals in the context of the integration of technology into the traditional educational process: 1) to promote learners’ knowledge self-assessment, and 2) to support the teacher in the improvement of the learning course through systematic assessment of learners’ knowledge and analysis of its results. The goals are reached by the use of concept maps as an assessment tool and by providing opportunities to extend an initially created concept map for the next assessment stages and to present a learner information about his/her errors at the end of each assessment stage. The latter feature supports process oriented learning and makes the system unique among other similar systems. The system has been being developed already for 6 years by continuously improving its functionality. At the moment it offers a graphical user interface for manipulations of concept maps by the teacher and learners, the presentation of information about learners' errors, six tasks of different degrees of difficulty with adaptation of tasks’ difficulty to each particular learner, an intelligent algorithm for the comparison of teacher’s and learner’s concept maps. In this paper the overview of the system is given specifying goals of the system, its discriminative features, the scenario of usage of the system and the results of testing the system in different study courses