Evaluating the coverage of syllabus terminology in student's dissertations.
Abstract: In formal education systems, teachers often oversee numerous students, which can seriously complicate the task of monitoring each student’s comprehension of lessons. Learning analytics (LA) offers teachers a support medium for this monitoring. Since each individual student has his own way of explaining a concept, effective semantic analysis is imperative to link such explanations to a single concept. Our proposed method evaluates the coverage of syllabus terminology in student’s written dissertations by implementing linguistic and cognitive knowledge. We use an asymmetric coverage measure to determine how the concepts are covered in students’ dissertations. Our approach detected weaker dissertations by indicating low conceptual coverage. We also conducted a member check to evaluate our findings, and teachers suggested that our analytic approach could be used to provide a quick overview of each student’s ability to acquire important concepts.
Presider: Marko Teräs, Tampere University of Applied Sciences