Onderzoeksproject
dhr. ir.ing. H.J.M. Passier
Feedback is a very important mechanism in every educational process. Most of the literature about feedback deals with delayed reaction on questions and assessments in which mostly declarative knowledge is tested. But feedback is useful in many other situations: it can be used when testing procedural knowledge, to support the development of declarative knowledge, active learning and creative processes like problem solving.
We will perform a literature study in the field of feedback and education. The results of this study will be used to select the kinds of feedback we want to support in our tools. We will study whether or not there exist formal languages for feedback, and if not, what the requirements are for such a language.
The two main subpackages of this project are:
- Feedback in authoring tools.
- Feedback in playing tools.
Within each of these subpackages one can distinguish several directions of research. An authoring tool can give feedback on the structure of the domain model, and on the domain model in relation to the tutoring model, and a playing tool can give both individual feedback as feedback on group behavior.
Feedback can only be given after analyzing input or interactions, so the development of different analyses will form an important component of this project.
Besides providing feedback by means of analyzing the different models, an author might also want to specify what kind of feedback should be given in what situations. This kind of technique is also used for reporting type-error messages in compilers. We want to develop a domain specific language for specifying this kind of feedback.
The kinds of feedback we want to give, the kinds of analyses we want to perform, and the kinds of languages we want to use for specifying both the models as well as possible feedback will lead to several requirements for tools that can deal effectively with feedback. We want to specify a list of requirements for authoring and playing tools with advanced feedback capabilities.
Finally, we want to test our ideas in a prototype eLearning tool.
Research plan (pdf)
