Evaluation and improvement of student's question-posing ability in a web-based learning environment

With the rapid development of web-based learning environments, question-posing activities have become an important teaching and learning mode. However, this learning approach has some difficulties, one being the lack of a practical approach to assist teachers in evaluating the question-posing ability of all learners. To remedy this problem, the present study developed a system of integrating a reward mechanism into assessment activities, to measure the question-posing ability of individual students in a web-based learning environment. The system has been applied to a learning activity in a programming design course and 100 first-year college students were invited to participate in this research. After the experiment, the results showed the proposed system can serve as both a learning and an assessment tool in higher education, by encouraging students to carry out active learning, constructive criticism and knowledge sharing. A positive satisfaction is derived from the learning activities with the system under two dimensions of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Most importantly, students' learning performance improved significantly.