Description

The Student Inspector displays usage data of ActiveMath in an intelligible way in order to give some insight in how students use the system. In distance learning scenarios, but also in classroom sessions, it's important for a teacher to get aware of problems students have, be it a misapprehension of an important concepts in the domain of instruction, a deficiency in a basic competence, lack of motiviation and seriousness in the usage of the learning system or even problems in handling the software. All these problems are manifested to a large extent in the logged interactions between student and learning system: The log data contains information such as achieved performance values, system generated error type classifications and the sequence of page visits. Because of an unmanageble flood of log data the need for a tool arises that preprocesses and organizes the available information along dimensions that allow teachers to effectively and efficiently get the information they need.

The Student Inspector is based on an analysis of teachers' requirements. Therefore, we asked teachers which aspects of students' system usage would be especially interesting and helpful to them in order to raise the level of their instructional activities. The Student Inspector realizes these requirements by providing displays that enable teachers to find out, among other things, which students show the poorest performances, what are the most frequent error types (see screenshot below), what are weak and strong topics and compentences for a given student and what's the sequence of activities for a given learning session.

References

• Getting to Know your Student in Distance-Learning Contexts (article)
• How did the e-learning session go? - The Student Inspector (article)
• Der Student Inspector - Verstehen und Unterstützen von Lernenden in computerbasierten Lernszenarien (poster)