We focus in this talk on automated methods for assessing freely constructed textual responses (as opposed to responses to, for instance, multiple-choice questions). Learner-constructed responses fit well with constructivist theories of learning that emphasize learners constructing their own knowledge and with self-explanation theories of learning that emphasize learners self-explaining their understanding of target concepts.
The self-generation process, the key feature of learner-constructed responses, offers unique opportunities and challenges when it comes to automating the assessment process. An effect of the self-generation aspect of open-ended responses, which is an advantage and a challenge at the same time, is their diversity along many quantitative and qualitative dimensions. For instance, free responses can vary in size from one word to a paragraph to a full document. The challenging part is the fact that there needs to be a solution that can handle the entire variety of student responses, a tall order.
Another major challenge is that open-ended responses may need to be assessed in different ways depending on the target domain and instructional goals. This makes it difficult to compare assessments. For example, in automated essay scoring the emphasis is more on how learners argue for their position with respect to an essay prompt while in other tasks, such as conceptual Physics problem solving or source code comprehension, the emphasis is more on the content and accuracy of the solution articulated by the learner. We will provide an overview of the opportunities, challenges, and state-of-the-art solutions in the area of automated assessment of learner-generated natural language responses.
Furthermore, we will argue that student-generated open responses (be them textual, visual, or in some abstract language such as mathematical expressions) are the only assessment modality that leads to true assessment because are the only assessment modality that reveals students’ true mental model. As an immediate consequence, future educational technologies should include open-ended assessment items and corresponding facilities that enable the automated assessment of such open-ended student responses.
As epoch-making inventions in the history of human beings, the digital techniques including internet and mobile phone have comprehensively changed the lifestyle of contemporary people. Adolescents and youth are the most active mobile phone users and network group on the Internet, and also the group most vulnerable to the impacts of digital tools. The digital environment has the characteristics of anonymity, asynchrony, transcendence, and disinhibition, which make it have an important effect on students' self-development, cognitive development, social interaction, emotional adaptation and behavioral adaptation. Based on the ecological techno-microsystem theory, the model of interaction between human and technology, the third space hypothesis of the network, etc., we re-thought the way for a better understanding the development of adolescents and youth in the digital environment, and propose the development characteristics of cognitive schema-emotional attitude-behavior. From the perspective of researchers, educators and parents, we discussed how to effectively play the positive role of the network in adolescents’ development, so that promoting network technology to be better applied for the healthy growth of adolescents and providing guidance of education and training for adolescents in the digital environment.
