Short Paper: Assessing Procedural Knowledge in Open- ended Questions through Semantic Web Ontologies

This paper presents a novel approach for automatically grading students’ answers to open-ended questions. It is inspired by the OeLE method, which uses ontologies and Semantic Web technologies to represent course material. The main difference in our approach is that we add a new category of concepts, named functional concepts, which allow specifying an ordering relation between concepts. This modification allows assessing procedural knowledge in students’ answers by grading the ordering of these concepts. We present an example for grading answers in a course about computer algorithms, and report the corresponding results.