Student interactions with e-assessment > Student behaviour

Question 13
How do students interact with an e-assessment system?

• Igor' Kontorovich
• Peter Rowlett
• Niclas Larson
• George Kinnear

What do students do when they engage with a mathematical question presented by the e-assessment system? Do the use paper-and-pencil to make calculations, do they do that mentally, or do they use other resources? Maybe even more importantly, how do students engage with the automated feedback that they receive? Do they read it? How? What do they do next? Igor’s team in Auckland has started tackling questions of this sort.

What motivates this question?

More often than not, task and feedback design is based on assumptions regarding how students interact with what e-assessment system has to offer. Generating an empirical base of evidence on how students engage with e-systems seems paramount.

What might an answer look like?

The answer might look like trajectories and profiles that account for students’ reactions to offered questions and feedback.

A possible approach would be to analyse observations of students as they work on e-assessment tasks, similar to Dorko (2020) or Jordan (2012). This could be supplemented with analysis of a larger group of students’ interactions with e-assessment, using logs generated by the system (e.g., Chen et al., 2018; Roth et al., 2008).

Related questions

The issue of student engagement with e-assessment system is related to:

• Q8: How useful for students’ long-term learning is feedback that gives a series of follow-up questions, from a decision tree, versus a single terminal piece of feedback?
• Q14: To what extent does repeated practice on randomized e-assessment tasks encourage mathematics students to discover deep links between ideas?
• Q16: What should students be encouraged to do following success in e-assessment?
• Q15: How do students engage with automated feedback? What differences (if any) can be identified with how they would respond to feedback from a teacher?
• Q20: How can e-assessment be used in group work, and what effect does the group element have on individuals’ learning?

References

Chen, X., Breslow, L., & DeBoer, J. (2018). Analyzing productive learning behaviors for students using immediate corrective feedback in a blended learning environment. Computers & Education, 117, 59-74.

Dorko, A. (2020). Red X’s and Green Checks: A Model of How Students Engage with Online Homework. International Journal of Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education, 6(3), 446–474. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40753-020-00113-w

Jordan, S. (2012). Student engagement with assessment and feedback: some lessons from short-answer free-text e-assessment questions. Computers & Education, 58(2), 818-834. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.10.007

Roth, V., Ivanchenko, V., & Record, N. (2008). Evaluating student response to WeBWorK, a web-based homework delivery and grading system. Computers & Education, 50(4), 1462–1482. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.COMPEDU.2007.01.005