| Investigated and reported in this dissertation is a modern Web-based Distributed Mathematics Assessment System (DMAS). The interdisciplinary work involves mathematics, computer science and education. As part of the Web-based Mathematics Education (WME) project, DMAS works well with WME for middle school mathematics education. But, like WME, DMAS is designed to work independently and at different education levels. The primary goal of research here is the design and implementation of a Web-based mathematics assessment system that is not only useful, practical, and powerful but also allows teachers everywhere to contribute to a distributed question bank that can grow quickly and be shared broadly. DMAS has undergone multiple pilot trials at Kimpton middle school and benefited greatly from collaboration with others in the WME project. At the core of DMAs is the Distributed Mathematics Assessment database (DMAD) that is designed to work as one distributed database while providing power, unity, and convenience at each participating school. DMAS features include: a test authoring tool for teachers, online taking of tests for students, grading and results administration, question diagnosis and dynamic linking to TLP materials, importing/exporting DMAS File Formats (DFF), mathematics answer checking, automatic question generation, and an XML language designed for question markup, the Mathematics Assessment Markup Language (MAML). DMAS supports many problem types, provides a search engine for assessment questions, and allows mathematical formulas/expressions as well as geometry drawings/graphs to be part of questions and answers. Furthermore, DMAS supports the use of test taking as a teaching method. A teacher can monitor all students from the teacher terminal in real-time and either verbally guide the whole class on certain points or interact privately with one or more students via a Teacher-Student Interaction Mechanism (TSIM) provided by DMAS. Questions in DMAS use a well-designed representation (encoding) allowing correct answers, rubrics, formulas, images, geometrical objects (SVG), and multimedia as well as interactive contents. Because DMAS has been designed in consultation with middle school teachers and education experts, the underline DMAS system design and framework is easy and flexible for future changes, requirements, expansions, and customizations. DMAS provides features to support real-life test giving such as loss of power to a laptop and retaking of tests. DMAS has also begun to investigate automatic grading of student answers by using well-defined Web-based answer checking services. DMAS is an independent Web system easily interfaced to any Web page through a well-defined API. DMAS is an open system involves Client-Side and Serve-Side programming and implemented with standard Web/Internet/Database technologies and protocols. |
