Improving education through improved assessment

The assessment component of the educational process has great potential to enhance students learning. This benefit is typically unrealized, however, primarily due to the infeasibility of implementing more effective assessment alternatives in the resource-limited settings typical of modern educational environments. In this paper we present a system architecture that exploits hypermedia technology to overcome serious limitations of traditional assessment methods. The architecture addresses the design of cost-effective confidence-measuring and performance-testing assessment vehicles using hypermedia-based student-system interaction. We describe the conceptual foundation and its embodiment in prototypes.