An ontology crystallization approach to designing performance-based testing scenario

Abstract

The design of Performance-Based Testing is an interesting and important issue for the assessment of the students’ problem solving or inquiry process capabilities. In this paper, we aim to design a wiki-like authoring environment based upon the Performance Assessment Ontology to support the collaborative design. However, the ontology inconsistency and incompleteness issues become more serious when constructing the ontology collaboratively. Therefore, the Ontology Crystallization scheme is proposed to support the scenario design with collaborative brainstorming and social agreement evaluation. There are three phases which are concept boundary extension phase, ontology integration phase, and conflict resolution phase. The collaborative brainstorming is based on the sharing of designed ontology, and the conflict resolution is based on the modified Delphi Method with questionnaire based voting. To demonstrate our scheme, it is applied to the designing of the “Banana Farm” assessment scenario. Finally, the experiment and evaluation shows the effectiveness of the designed result.