Year: 2017
Type: preprint
Abstract: An important, yet largely unstudied, problem in student data analysis is to detect misconceptions from students' responses to open-response questions. Misconception detection enables instructors to deliver more targeted feedback on the misconceptions exhibited by many students in their class, thus improving the quality of instruction. In this paper, we propose a new natural language processing-based framework to detect the common misconceptions among students' textual responses to short-answer questions. We propose a probabilistic model for students' textual responses involving misconceptions and experimentally validate it on a real-world student-response dataset. Experimental results show that our proposed framework excels at classifying whether a response exhibits one or more misconceptions. More importantly, it can also automatically detect the common misconceptions exhibited across responses from multiple students to multiple questions; this property is especially important at large scale, since instructors will no longer need to manually specify all possible misconceptions that students might exhibit.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institutions: Rice University, Princeton University
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Science Applications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2806965553