Can We Get Better Assessment From A Tutoring System Compared to Traditional Paper Testing? Can We Have Our Cake (Better Assessment) and Eat It too (Student Learning During the Test)?

Dynamic assessment (DA) has been advocated as an interactive approach to conduct assessments to students in the learning systems as it can differentiate student proficiency at a finer grained level. Sternberg and others have been pursuing an alternative to IQ tests. They proposed to give students tests to see how much assistance it takes a student to learn a topic; and to use as a measure of their learning gain. They referred to this as dynamic assessment. It was suggested that this assisting-while-testing procedure could be done well by computer. To researchers in the intelligent tutoring system community, it comes as no surprise that measuring how much assistance a student needs to complete a task successfully is probably a good indicator of this lack of knowledge. However, a cautionary note is that conducting DA takes more time than simply administering regular test items to students. In this paper, we report a study analyzing 40-minutes data of 1,392 students from two school years using educational data mining techniques. We compare two conditions: one contains only practice items without intervention while the other condition allows students to seek for help when they encounter difficulties. The result suggests that for the purpose of assessing student performance, it is more efficient for students to take DA than just having practice items.