Errors and feedback > Student errors
Question 1
What common errors do students make when answering online assessment questions?
Tim Lowe
Ian Jones
Tim Hunt
Igor' Kontorovich
Niclas Larson
Peter Rowlett
Indunil Sikurajapathi
Karen Henderson
Student make mistakes for a range of reasons, from the trivial to the conceptual. We are interested in conceptual errors, so we can improve our teaching, and perhaps reveal tricky topics. We are interested in errors made interpreting questions, so we can author less ambiguously. Conceptual errors are likely to be different for each area of mathematical knowledge.
Common errors may be due to
- Careless errors: slips in working
- Errors of intepreration: students answered the wrong question
- Mathematical errors made when answering the question
We are probably more interested in the later categories, but to reveal those issues, we may first need to elimitate more trivial causes of error.
What motivates this question?
An answer to this question might help:
- Creators of Assessment systems - to produce systems which avoid technical and input issues, to the assessment outcomes depend on the mathematics.
- Teachers - to gain a better understanding of what are tricky topics, that need to be taught with care.
- Question authors - to develop better techniques, to create questions that are not liable to misinterpretation.
- … and where feedback for students should be added for common errors.
What might an answer look like?
Online assessment systems store all responses by all students in a database. This is a large pool of data that could be mined.
There are various papers that have attempted to examine student work for misconceptions (Jordan et al., 2003; Greenhow & Gill, 2004; Walker, Gwynllyw & Henderson, 2015). Note that Walker, Gwynllyw & Henderson (2015) completed a post-assessment analysis of e-assessment data and found a large number of errors that were made quite infrequently by students, suggesting pre-empting student errors may be quite difficult in practice.
Related questions
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There are a group of related questions about common errors: Q11: What are the relative merits of addressing student errors up-front in the teaching compared with using e-assessment to detect and give feedback on errors after they are made?
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Q2: Do the errors students make in e-assessments differ from those they make in paper-based assessments? Are the answers found here are CAA-specific, or generally applicable.
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This question perhaps precedes Q3: What are the approaches to detecting and feeding back on students’ errors?
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This question probably precedes Q2: Do the errors students make in e-assessments differ from those they make in paper-based assessments?One needs to separately identify errors made in online and paper submissions (separately) before comparing the two.
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The issue of student input of mathematics is related to Q39: What methods are available for student input of mathematics?.
References
Greenhow, M. & Gill, M. (2004). Setting objective tests in mathematics using QM Perception. Proceedings of the 8th Computer Assisted Assessment Conference, Loughborough University, 6th-7th July 2004 (pp. 115-126). Loughborough: Loughborough University.
Jordan, S. (2013). E-assessment: Past, present and future. New Directions, 9(1), 87-106. https://doi.org/10.11120/ndir.2013.00009
Sikurajapathi, I., Henderson, K., & Gwynllyw, R. (2020). Using e-assessment to address mathematical misconceptions in engineering students. International Journal of Information and Education Technology, 10(5), 356-361. https://doi.org/10.18178/ijiet.2020.10.5.1389
Walker, P., Gwynllyw, D.R. & Henderson, K.L. (2015). Diagnosing student errors in e-Assessment questions. Teaching Mathematics and its Applications, 34(3), 160-170. https://doi.org/10.1093/teamat/hrv010