An Innovative Approach for Assisting Teachers in Improving Instructional Strategies via Analyzing Historical Assessment Data of Students

Abstract

Identifying learning problems of students has been recognized as an important issue for assisting teachers in improving their instructional skills or learning design strategies. The accumulated assessment data provide an excellent resource for achieving this objective. However, most of conventional testing systems only record students' test results, which are not helpful to teachers in realizing students' learning problems without further assistance. To cope with this problem, in this study, an innovative approach that combines a student concept model and the change mining mechanism is proposed to analyze the learning problems of students from their historical assessment data. The teachers received the analysis results and then used those suggestions to improve their instructional strategies. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, a web-based learning assessment system has been developed and an experiment has been conducted on an “Introduction to Computers” course in a university. The experimental results showed that, those analysis results provided by the innovative approach were helpful to the teachers in providing appropriate instructional assistance and remedial learning materials for improving the learning achievements of the students.