Diagnostic mode¶
Page status: Outline
This is a rough outline of an article. It might not use full sentences everywhere and probably won’t make much sense at the moment.
Motivation¶
Want to administer a test to establish the student’s strengths and weaknesses, in as few questions as possible.
Solution¶
Questions asked depend on the student’s answers to previous questions.
A “diagnostic” mode for exams. This adds:
A knowledge graph, consisting of topics and learning objectives. Topics are linked by “depends on” and “leads to” relations. Learning objectives collect many topics.
A diagnostic algorithm, written in a similar format to marking algorithms: a collection of declarative notes.
Each topic corresponds to a group of questions.
When running the exam, the diagnostic algorithm has a state object, which the algorithm is responsible for initialising and updating. This object can take any form.
The loop is:
Pick a question to show to the student.
When the student chooses to move on (this is usually after answering the question, but could be any time) give the student some options.
Each option nominates the next question, and an updated state object.
If there are no options, the exam ends.
During the exam the student is shown a feedback message, as well as a list of progress scores (in DIAGNOSYS, one for each learning objective).
After the exam ends, the student is shown a list of scores (in DIAGNOSYS, one for each learning objective) and a feedback message.