0 Automated Formative Assessment: Providing Linguistic Support
through Online Modules Presented by: Ken Petersen 11/18/2011 ASEES
42nd Annual Convention Washington, DC
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1 What is Formative Assessment? Formative assessment allows a
teacher to capture learning as it occurs, and to make appropriate
instructional adjustments. It is distinct from summative assessment
in several aspects: o Frequency o Goals Stakes Stakeholders o
Outcomes What effect does assessment have on the learners
linguistic development and/or language career path? o Shelf-life of
the data
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2 Online Formative Assessment The state of the art for the
critical languages is less than optimal. o First generation
Web-based CALL applications provide little data on learner
performance and live in strict isolation from one another. Russnet,
Langnet, GLOSS, Arabic Without Walls, CenAsiaNet, etc. o
Development of good materials is time and labor intensive. Russnet
has been providing learners and teachers the opportunity to use
online pedagogical materials for formative assessment for over a
decade. o Reading, listening and writing activities that capture:
Scores Student mistakes Student essays Teacher feedback o Data
collected to date: Activities completed: 321,368 Mistakes: 566,077
Student Essays: 26,302 Writing Comments: 2,735
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3 Moving Forward Opportunities for online formative assessment
are growing at a staggering rate. o Access to authentic language
content (text, audio and video) o Online communication provides
immediacy in feedback o Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and
resources are moving online NLP Tools Part of speech taggers
Morphological analyzers Syntactic parsers NLP resources Electronic
dictionaries Bi-text corpora o Web-services are allowing data and
functionality to be shared between applications.
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4 Generating Dynamic Activities Together with the Center for
Research in Computational Linguistics, American Councils is
developing a suite of online tools for generating on the fly
support for Russian lexis and morphology. The technology can embed
instructional support into Russian texts from a broad array of
contexts. The learner performance data derived from these
activities could be used to provide pedagogically meaningful
feedback to learners and teachers. An initial prototype is the
Russian News Reader.
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5 Russian News Reader (RNR): Search
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6 RNR: Search Result
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7 RNR: Lexical Support
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8 RNR: Passive Morphological Support Highlight: Verbs
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9 RNR: Passive Morphological Support Fill-in the Blanks:
Adjectives
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10 RNR: Passive Morphological Support Multiple-choice:
Adjectives
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11 Dynamic Activities & Formative Assessment The challenge
at hand is to effectively model the data that we might capture from
learner-text interactions. We have robust knowledge of lexis and
morphology: o Part of speech o Gender o Number o Case We need to
create a model that will provide informative and actionable
evidence for formative assessment. There need to be intuitive
graphical representations of the data. Khan Academy provides a nice
framework for this.
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12 Contact Ken Petersen American Councils for International
Education 1828 L Street NW, Suite 1200 Washington, DC
[email protected] You can download this presentation at:
http://lab.americancouncils.org/pres/AFA.pptx