Human expert funding for question-answering communities

Abstract

Primary School Leaving Examinations, also known as PSLE, is a national examination taken by all students in Singapore in their final year of Primary school before they are promoted into Secondary school. In particular, the Mathematics examination paper is a combination of multiple-choices, short answers, and structured questions. This structured style format makes it very distinctive in contrast to most examinations in other countries.

In this project, Discover@Maths System (DAMS) is developed as an online community-driven knowledge sharing system focused on the PSLE Mathematics subject. DAMS leverages the insights of a live user community; students can participate in asking questions and learn from the responses contributed by other users. Simple content retrieval techniques were explored in this project such as questions suggestion based on user interests and query term indexing; popular query search terms are tokenized and parsed into a search term cloud. These features are implemented with the goal of reaching these popular contents out to interested users. Students can participate anytime with DAMS as a web application, ensuring that learning productivity is not merely limited to the time spent in school.

A worksheet generator feature is in place to allow users to create practise worksheets. These worksheets can contain their favourite questions or be pre-populated by the generator engine based on question topics and popularity. This feature encourages students to discuss their answers offline, before they post their final answer on DAMS. This is one strategy in which by ensuring productive answers or discussions to the questions are available on DAMS, student participation rate will increase.

These features are implemented with the goal of maximising the potential of self independent learning in today’s Primary school students. However, the current features are not the limitations to what this system can achieve; other Mathematical syllabus such as the ‘O’ Levels Mathematics may be explored in the future.