Technical
Report TR2006-11-02 November, 2006
Internetworking and Media Communications Research Laboratories
Department of Computer Science,
http://medianet.kent.edu/technicalreports.html
A novel approach for Test Problem Assessment using Course Ontology
Manas Hardas
Computer Science Department
Kent State University
November 2006.
Abstract
Semantic analysis of educational resources is a very interesting problem with numerous applications. Like any design process, educational resources also have basic elements of design and reproduction. In the process of designing test problems, these elements are in the form of information objects. Course knowledge can be represented in the form of prerequisite relation based ontology using which, assessment and information extraction from test problems is possible. We propose a language schema based on Web Ontology Language (OWL) for formally describing course ontologies. Using this schema, course ontologies can be represented in a standard and sharable way. An evaluation system acts as the backend for the design and re-engineering system. This research aims at automating the process of intelligent evaluation of test-ware resources by providing qualitative assessment of test problems. Some synthetic parameters for the assessment of a test problem in its concept space are introduced. The parameters are tested in some real world scenarios and intuitive inferences are deduced predicting the performance of the parameters. It is observed that the difficulty of a question is often a function of the knowledge content and complexity of the concepts it tests.