As educational systems move from onsite to online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers face the difficulty of designing online examination formats which minimize opportunities for dishonesty. In this paper, we expose our design of such a format: a protected Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing short-answer questions, which was implemented in a…

Knowledge space theory (KST) is a mathematical framework for modeling and assessing student knowledge. While KST has successfully served as the foundation of several learning systems, recent advancements in machine learning provide an opportunity to improve on purely KST-based approaches to assessing student knowledge. As such, in this work we…

Representational competence is essential for the acquisition of conceptual understanding in physics. It enables the interpretation of diagrams, graphs, and mathematical equations, and relating these to one another as well as to observations and experimental outcomes. In this study, we present the initial validation of a newly developed…

In this paper we report the results of an experiment designed to test the hypothesis that when faced with a question involving the inverse direction of a reversible mathematical process, students solve a multiple-choice version by verifying the answers presented to them by the direct method, not by undertaking the actual inverse calculation.…

Computerized adaptive (CA) testing uses an algorithm to match examinee ability to item difficulty, while self-adapted (SA) testing allows the examinee to choose the difficulty of his or her items. Research comparing SA and CA testing has shown that examinees experience lower anxiety and improved performance with SA testing. All previous research…