Tools for ubiquitous assessment in discussion-based pedagogy

Our research is founded on the idea that ubiquitous, nonintrusive, concept-centric student assessment is an important way for teachers to gain insight into the educational needs of their students. Ubiquitous assessment means that assessment is an integral part of students’ everyday activities, thus allowing for a detailed temporal understanding of the students’ progress. In order for ubiquitous assessment to work, it must also be non-intrusive. In most situations, it’s unrealistic to have students take tests every day. Not only would it be onerous, but it detracts from time spent actually learning new material. Therefore, we argue for integrating assessment into learning activities. This allows teachers to understand what notions the students begin an activity with, and how the activity has helped them revise and improve upon that understanding. While ubiquitous assessment represents a fine-grained approach to assessment with respect to frequency, we believe that assessment should also be fine-grained with respect to the type of knowledge being assessed. While a homework assignment or test question might determine whether a student understands a concept well enough to accomplish the assigned task, detailed knowledge of the concept may still be erroneous. In order to provide this type of continuous, detailed tracking of student knowledge, we have developed a set of tools, collectively called INFACT. These tools are particularly suited for use with an instructional methodology in which students to build knowledge through small group collaboration and group discussion. In this paper, we discuss this pedagogical technique, it’s application to teaching math and computer programming concepts, and some of the computational methods that underly the tools.