Assessment of knowledge and confidence for E-learning

Abstract

One of the most important goals in E-learning is to guarantee that participants reach the learning objectives. We have observed that having the knowledge of the subject is not sufficient for reaching learning objectives. The participants must also develop understanding that they know the subject, which we have named confidence. In this work, we have demonstrated that it is possible to assess both knowledge and confidence using only two different types of multiple-choice test questions. We have developed 1) a method to design questions to identify both knowledge and confidence and 2) a method to estimate actual knowledge and confidence from answers. We have evaluated our method using Monte-Carlo simulations. Our simulations demonstrated that it is always possible to obtain reliable estimations for knowledge and confidence using approximately 100 multiple choice test questions in a given subject.