A novel approach for Test Problem Assessment using Course Ontology

A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Masters of Science.

Manas Sudhakar Hardas

December, 2006

Table of Contents

Table of figures. iv

Acknowledgements. v

Abstract. 1

Chapter 1. 1

Introduction and Background.. 1

1.1. Related Work. 5

1.2. Thesis contribution. 7

Chapter 2. 9

Course knowledge representation using ontologies. 9

2.1. Knowledge Representation Issues. 10

2.2. Course Ontology. 12

2.3. Representation Standards. 15

2.3.1 Course Ontology Description Language (CODL) 19

2.3.2 Extensions to CODL. 27

2.4. Mathematical representation of Concept Space Graph (CSG) 28

2.4.1 Node Path Weight 30

2.4.2 Incident Path Weight 32

Chapter 3. 33

Educational resources and Test Problems. 33

3.1. Problem concept mapping. 34

Chapter 4. 37

Test Problem Assessment. 37

4.1. Approach. 37

4.2. CSG Extraction. 39

4.2.1 Threshold Coefficient (λ) 41

4.2.2 Projection Graph. 43

4.3. Assessment parameters. 44

4.3.1 Coverage (α) 44

4.3.2 Diversity (∆) 46

4.3.3 Conceptual Distance (δ) 49

Chapter 5. 51

Performance analysis and results. 51

5.1. Parameter performance against average score.