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Measuring the Quality of Test-based Exercises Based on the Performance of Students

Abstract:

In order to be effective, a learning process requires the use of valid and suitable educational resources. However, measuring the quality of an educational resource is not an easy task for a teacher. The data of the performance of the students can be used to measure how appropriate the didactic resources are. Besides this data, adequate metrics and statistics are also needed. In this paper, TEA, a Visual Learning Analytics tool for measuring the quality of a particular type of educational resources, in particular test-based exercises, is presented. TEA is a teacher-oriented tool aimed at helping them to improve the quality of the learning material they have created by analyzing and visualizing the performance of the students. TEA evaluates not only the adequacy of individual items but also the appropriateness of a whole test. TEA provides the results of the evaluation so that they are easily interpretable by teachers and developers of educational material. The development of TEA required a thorough analysis and classification of metrics and statistics to identify those which are useful to measure the quality of test-based exercises using the data about the performance of the students. The tool provides visual representations of the performance of the students to allow teachers to evaluate the appropriateness of the test-based exercises they have created. The experimentation carried out with TEA at higher education level is also presented.