Mathematical skills > Example generation

Question 55
How does the use of e-assessment impact students’ example generation strategies and success, relative to the same tasks on paper or orally?

• George Kinnear

What motivates this question?

Students’ strategies have been studied in previous work (e.g. Iannone et al., 2011) but computer-aided assessment brings additional constraints that warrant further investigation. For instance, students may immediately be able to sketch an example with the required properties, or orally describe the relevant features, but may struggle to formulate this as an algebraic expression that is suitable for entry into the CAA system. As a specific example, they may wish to use a piecewise function but may not know the notation to use (if it is even possible in a given CAA system).

What might an answer look like?

This would likely require in-depth qualitative investigation of students’ strategies, e.g. through observations or clinical interviews (as in Iannone et al., 2011).

The mathematical topic is likely to be an important factor, as suggested by the example of students being able to sketch a function but not write a corresponding algebraic expression. So perhaps part of the answer would involve an audit of topics where this is most likely to be an issue (perhaps generating a list of mathematical objects/operations that are not currently well-supported in e-assessment, that developers of e-assessment systems could look to address).

Related questions

• This is a specific instance of Q41: Are there differences in performance on mathematics problems presented on paper versus as e-assessments?, on differences in performance between paper and electronic tasks.
• The availability of different input types (Q39: What methods are available for student input of mathematics?) could moderate student strategies/success.
• This is an example of translating a paper-based task to e-assessment, so could contribute to Q23: E-assessment task designers often convert questions that could be asked on a traditional pen and paper exam: what are the implications, technicalities, affordances and drawbacks of this approach?.
• Two other questions are concerned with example-generation: Q54: To what extent can e-assessments meaningfully judge student responses to example generation tasks?

References

Iannone, P., Inglis, M., Mejía-Ramos, J. P., Simpson, A., & Weber, K. (2011). Does generating examples aid proof production? Educational Studies in Mathematics, 77(1), 1–14.