An Effective Multimedia Item Shell Design for Individualized Education The Crome Project.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Multimedia Volume 2008, Article ID 825671, 10 pages doi:10.1155/2008/825671 Research Article An Effective Multimedia Item Shell Design for Individualized Education: The Crome Project Irene Cheng1, 2 and Anup Basu1 1 Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Canada T6B 2E8 2 Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, PA 16802, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Irene Cheng, chenglin@ Received 10 August 2007; Revised 15 January 2008; Accepted 12 February 2008 Recommended by S. Takamura There are several advantages to creating multimedia item types and applying computer-based adaptive testing in education. First is the capability to motivate learning by making the learners feel more engaged and in an interactive environment. Second is a better concept representation, which is not possible in conventional multiple-choice tests. Third is the advantage of individualized curriculum design, rather than a curriculum designed for an average student. Fourth is a good choice of the next question, associated with the appropriate difficulty level based on a student’s response to the current question. However, many issues need to be addressed when achieving these goals, including: (a) the large number of item types required to represent the current multiple- choice questions in multimedia formats, (b) the criterion used to determine the difficulty level of a multimedia question item, and (c) the methodology applied to the question selection process for individual students. In this paper, we propose a multimedia item shell design that not only reduces the number of item types required, but also computes difficulty level of an item automatically. The concept of question seed is i