Who Needs Help? Automating Student Assessment Within Exploratory Learning Environments

This article describes efforts to offer automated assessment of students within an exploratory learning environment. We present a regression model that estimates student assessments in an ill-defined medical diagnosis tutor called Rashi. We were pleased to find that basic features of a student's solution predicted expert assessment well, particularly when detecting low-achieving students. We also discuss how expert knowledge bases might be leveraged to improve this process. We suggest that developers of exploratory learning environments can leverage this technique with relatively few extensions to a mature system. Finally, we describe the potential to utilize this information to direct teachers' attention towards students in need of help.