STAR: A Collaborative Technology for Personalized Feedback in Learning

The system of testing, analyzing and reporting (star) underlies the following components: the development of collaborative databases of items in several languages, the assessment of students' knowledge and abilities in various school subjects by using tests from the databases, an individualized feedback to every student which is obtained by processing his/her answers following a multi-criteria analysis, and the improvement of student's learning by offering new sets of questions situated in his/her range of proximal development. The databases of items are collaboratively developed, according to strict procedures. Briefly, the items are potentially submitted by any registered user in the system; then they are processed by experts, validated by editors, and finally, recorded in specific databases. Within this process, the items are classified according to general criteria (for example, degree of difficulty, key stage, recommended time of solving), criteria that are discipline-specific (for example, specific competences in problem solving), and criteria that are item specific (for example, length, number of figures). The system allows to add new criteria and to record the items in complex networks of connections while the databases are being developed. The relations within the item-networks and the flexibility regarding the criteria allow better detecting students' level of knowledge and understanding. The STAR technology provides an individualized feedback delivered via Internet to every registered student. This feedback consists in personalized messages regarding the student's learning style and level of competence in the tested domain, obtained by correlating the information that is directly gathered from the student with what is already recorded in the item databases.