Automatic assessment on PSLE English comprehension for personalized learning

Abstract

The Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) is a national examination system that is administrated by the Ministry of Education for all graduating primary school students in Singapore and determines their admittances into a secondary school. In an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, the importance of the communication cannot be overstated. Especially for a multi-racial society like Singapore, English plays an important role as the common language used for communication. English Comprehension is a major component in obtaining an understanding of the English language. As technology advances, education has evolved rapidly and significantly with the occurrence of e-Learning systems. This allows students to access and learn the same online courses via Internet without adaptation, depending on their individual profile and behaviour. In order for a student to do well during examination, it is important to have an adequate amount of practice. However, it will be a tedious and time consuming process for the teachers to monitor and assess each student based on their individual learning capabilities. Hence, an automated e-Learning system is desired, in order to address this issue. The English Comprehension Express aims to enhance comprehension learning experience through teaching comprehension skills and tailoring the practice based on their individual ability. This is to simulate an online classroom environment where students can learn comfortably in a flexible schedule. All of the practices within the system are taken from either past year exam papers or assessment books that follows closely to the current PSLE examination syllabus. The English Comprehension Express system primarily focuses on the comprehension section which includes Open-Ended, Closed-Ended, Graphic Stimulus and Comprehension Cloze as it holds a substantial amount weightage in the examination. To address the issue of individualization in learning English Comprehension, an analysis is performed in the system to recognise the user’s learning pattern in the system which places emphasis on two approaches; Computerised Adaptive Testing (CAT) and Test Paper Generation (TPG) techniques. This automates the question storage and retrieval strategy to personalize the user’s practice according to his or her abilities. Additionally, questions will be tagged with a difficulty index which is derived from a level of readability. Through the analysis carried out by the system, findings can be used to accommodate individual user’s learning pace. Thus, users can improve on their comprehension skills progressively, resulting in an improved learning experience.