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Informatics Approach to Student Assessment
Author(s) -
Moorman Stephen J,
Mulheron George W
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.21.5.a139
Subject(s) - strengths and weaknesses , ontology , computer science , informatics , data science , construct (python library) , test (biology) , information retrieval , psychology , engineering , social psychology , paleontology , philosophy , epistemology , electrical engineering , biology , programming language
The advent of discipline‐specific hierarchical databases (ontologies) provides an opportunity to evaluate exams and students in a new way. Using an informatics approach and gross anatomy as a beta‐test course, we are creating assessment software that provides feedback classifying specific strengths and weaknesses by topic, organ system, region of the body, etc. This assessment tool uses an anatomy ontology created for the genomics community for annotating genomic data. The ontology contains the hierarchical relationships between structures necessary to construct genomic network inter‐relationships. By mapping anatomical terms from exams back to the ontology, a knowledge matrix is created representing the frequency of shared nodes in the ontology. The knowledge matrix can be used to analyze the exam to provide feedback to faculty about the exam content so that content can be matched to course objectives. A knowledge matrix is also created for each student's performance on an exam by mapping the frequency of shared nodes for just the questions the student answered correctly. By comparing the knowledge matrix for the exam to the student's performance matrix, the student's strengths and weaknesses can be determined. Using this strategy, students can be given the feedback necessary to align their weaknesses into subdivisions of anatomical knowledge in order to improve performance on future exams. Funded by UMDNJ