Multilevel Topic Dependency Models for Assessment Design and Delivery: A Hypergraph Based Approach

Abstract

The effective design and delivery of assessments in a wide variety of evolving educational environments remains a challenging problem. Proposals have included the use of learning dashboards, peer learning environments, and grading support systems; these embrace visualisations to summarise and communicate results. In an on-going project, the investigation of graph based visualisation models for assessment design and delivery has yielded promising results. Here, an alternative graph foundation, a two-weighted hypergraph, is considered to represent the assessment material (e.g., questions) and their explicit mapping to one or more learning objective topics. The visualisation approach considers the hypergraph as a collection of levels; the content of these levels can be customized and presented according to user preferences. A case study on generating hypergraph models using commonly available assessment data and a flexible visualisation approach using historical data from an introductory programming course is presented