Assessing the Student's Knowledge in Informatics Discipline Using the METEOR Metric

Abstract

1970s could be considered a frontier since when the computers became accessible to the large mass of users and not only to a restricted segment of the academic society. As a consequence after 1970s, in the next three decades, the computers use has been extended to all domains of activity. In fact, at present can be stated that there is no industry, no activity, no school, no process etc. which has not involved the computer in their development. The higher education organizations didn’t take any exceptions and enrolled themselves within the course of events and proceeded to capitalize on the computers use benefits. Many researchers driving different research programs have proved over the time that the computers are the solution to many fundamental and pervasive problems of the educational process. One of these problems is the learning performances measurement. Regardless the educational program proposed or the size of the higher education organization, the performances achieved are still to be measured. The students’ knowledge achieved after a teaching and learning cycle is ended have to be assessed in order to establish the course of actions to be taken and to ensure on one hand the proper environment for having a continual improvement of the teaching and learning cycle and, on the other hand, to understand if the teaching and learning objectives of both, teachers and students, have been achieved. One of the greatest achievements obtained during the computers use expansion era was the development of the Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). Considered at the very beginning of their existence as too complex nowadays, the ITSs are not anymore considered just a fancy tool but are considered the future of many domains. Education is one of these domains which look to have full benefits from the use of the ITSs. Moreover, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been brought in the loop of the ITSs development-continual improvement process and integrated successfully within various activities requirements. During the time have been demonstrated that whenever was possible to develop ITSs using Natural Language Processing techniques, than the benefits become even greater then in the case of a classic ITS. This paper, is briefly presenting an ITS that uses NLP techniques developed to teach and learn the course of Computers Programming and C Language, part of the Basics of Informatics curriculum, deemed to provide students with general knowledge about programming of computers and C language. Also, this paper addresses the possibility to use the Metric for Evaluation of Translation with Explicit Ordering (METEOR) as an option for student's knowledge assessment module.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n19p84