New Metrics for Learning Evaluation in Digital Education Platforms

TL;DR

This paper introduces new metrics for evaluating student understanding in digital education platforms, aiming to improve assessment beyond traditional scoring methods by capturing various learning aspects.

Contribution

It proposes a set of novel and modified metrics for measuring learning, combining multiple indicators to better assess student understanding in technology-based education.

Findings

Metrics provide useful insights into student understanding

Combining metrics reveals specific learning weaknesses

Proposed metrics are promising for educational assessment

Abstract

Technology applied in education can provide great benefits and overcome challenges by facilitating access to learning objects anywhere and anytime. However, technology alone is not enough, since it requires suitable planning and learning methodologies. Using technology can be problematic, especially in determining whether learning has occurred or not. Futhermore, if learning has not occured, technology can make it difficult to determine how to mitigate this lack of learning. This paper presents a set of new metrics for measuring student's acquired understanding of a content in technology-based education platforms. Some metrics were taken from the literature "as is", some were modified slighty, while others were added. The hypothesis is that we should not only focus on traditional scoring, because it only counts the number of hits/errors and does not consider any other aspect of learning. We applied all metrics to an assessment conducted in a high school class in which we show specific cases, along with metrics, where very useful information can be obtained from by combining several metrics. We conclude that the proposed metrics are promising for measuring student's acquired understanding of a content, as well as for teachers to measure student's weaknesses.