Ontology-Based Modelling for Learning on Bloom’s Taxonomy Comprehension Level

Abstract

The taxonomy of educational objectives allows specifying the level of assessments and making the learning process gradual progress over subsequent levels. Out of six levels for the cognitive domain, the most problematic level for e-learning task is the comprehension level because it includes such tasks as interpreting, summarizing and inferring which is typically manually graded. The lack of comprehension-level assessments in e-learning leads to students attempting to solve more difficult tasks without developing comprehension skills, which complicates the learning process. The article discusses using subject domain representation in the form of an ontology model which can be used to visualize the concepts and their relations for students, serve as a basis of a question-answering system for assessing student’s comprehension of the subject domain, generating a natural-language explanation of the student’s mistakes and creating adaptive quizzes. The requirements for the ontology to capture the comprehension level of the subject domain are formulated. The article discusses various application for such ontological models in the learning process.