1. Field of the Invention
The present invention provides systems and methods that make teaching and assessment of students' understanding of relationships between concepts and facts more interesting to students and teachers and also decreases the costs and elapsed time associated with creation, administration, and scoring of constructed responses for students.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Multiple choice type response items (i.e., questions) completely bind student responses to the question to the answer choices presented. This type of item must be constructed very carefully to avoid the problem of “smart test takers” guessing the answer to the problem based on the construction of the distracters (i.e., possible incorrect responses) versus the correct response. The binding of the item provides additional information about the intent of the question when the student evaluates the complete set of possible choices. This means that the time required for ensuring that the stimulus (i.e., a passage or graphic display about which questions are asked) was completely understood is reduced. Any misunderstandings that are possible from the stimulus but which are not offered as possible responses to the item can be discounted by the student.
Constructed response items, on the other hand, call for responses made up in the mind of the student, rather than chosen from a list of options. Paper and pencil, open, and computer or paper based text response constructed response items leave the students entirely unbounded in their response. This openness nearly eliminates the error in assessments based on “guessing”, but doesn't provide for any support for the student to ensure that the item's problem domain was clearly understood.
Computer software applications are available which teach the participant about relationships between various concepts. For example, children's interactive tutorial programs teach children about the relationships between different concepts by manipulating graphic icons on the computer screen in accordance with instructions provided by the program. For example, the child may be requested to match one object (e.g., a key) with a letter associated with it with a complimentary object (e.g., a keyhole) with the same letter on it. The child may be asked to associate a baby animal (e.g., a puppy, a kitten, a calf, a piglet) with an adult animal (e.g., dog, cat, cow, pig) of the same species based on the sound made by or the appearance of the baby animal—for example, by clicking on the baby animal and dragging it to one of a group of different adult animals. The child may be asked to drag objects of different shapes into correspondingly-shaped “holes.” The child may be presented with part of an incomplete pattern and a variety of objects from which to choose to complete the pattern by selecting the correct objects and placing them in the proper relationship with respect to each other.
Such exercises are more akin to restricted response assessment items; the participant is typically offered a limited choice of options available for manipulating the graphic icons. Moreover, such exercises are primarily a teaching tool, rather than an assessment tool. Typically, the program will not allow the participant to make an incorrect choice—e.g., the child will not be allowed to place a circular object into a triangular hole—, and if an incorrect choice is permitted, the participant is immediately advised in some manner that the choice is incorrect and encouraged to try another choice. In this regard, the program is teaching the participant about the correct relationships of the different concepts—e.g., the puppy goes with the dog, the kitten goes with the cat, the calf goes with the cow, and the piglet goes with the pig—; it is not testing the extent of the participant's cognitive understanding of the relationships of the different concepts.