Salvatore Valenti

Computer Based Assessment Systems Evaluation via the ISO9126 Quality Model

Many commercial products, as well as freeware and shareware tools, are the result of studies and research in this field made by companies and public institutions. This noteworthy growth in the market raises the problem of identifying a set of criteria that may be useful to an educational team wishing to select the most appropriate tool for their assessment needs. The scientific literature is very poor in respect of this issue. An important help is provided in this direction, by a number of research studies in the field of Software Engineering providing general criteria that may be used to evaluate software systems. Furthermore, a relevant effort has been made in this field by the International Standard Organization that in 1991 defined the ISO9126 standard for “Information Technology – Software Quality Characteristics and Sub-characteristics” (ISO, 1991). It is important to note that a typical CBA system is composed by: • A Test Management System (TMS) - i.e. a tool providing the instructor with an easy to use interface, the ability to create questions and to assemble them into tests, the possibility of grading the tests and making some statistical evaluations of the results. • A Test Delivery System (TDS) - i.e. a tool for the delivery of tests to the students. The tool may be used to deliver tests using paper and pencil, a stand-alone computer, on a LAN, or over the web. The TDS may be augmented with a web-enabler used to deliver the tests over the Web. In many cases producers distribute two different versions of the same TDS, one to deliver tests either on single computers or on LAN, and the other to deliver tests over the web. The TMS and TDS modules may be integrated in a single application or may be delivered as separate applications. Thus, it is of fundamental importance to devise a set of quality factors that can be used to evaluate both the modules belonging to this general structure of a CBA system.

Overcoming communication obstacles in user-analyst interaction for functional requirements elicitation

The importance of requirement engineering in the software development process has been widely recognised by the scientific community. One of the major error sources that arise in this phase is represented by ineffectual communication between users and analysts.Valusek and Fryback in [32] identify three classes of communication obstacles to a successful elicitation of requirements. Purpose of this paper is to discuss these obstacles and to identify the structure of a CASE tool that may allow to overcome them.

Supporting user-analyst interaction in functional requirements elicitation

A critical phase in the task of software engineering is represented by the elicitation of requirements from the users. The paper presents a cognitive approach to the elicitation of functional requirements of software systems founded on the modelling of the application domain. The framework outlined is grounded on an incremental process aimed at building a description of the real world, as perceived by the user and expressed in an informal way, in terms of physical objects and activities on them. The domain model is developed by applying the analyst stereotypical knowledge to the real world as described by the user, and requires the identification of knowledge chunks that may consent the process of specification reuse in different application domains.<<ETX>>

A modulus oriented hash function for the construction of minimal perfect tables

Purpose of this paper is to describe an algorithm for the construction of minimal perfect hash tables for small static word sets. As first step we have analysed Cook Oldehoefts letter oriented algorithm and then we have introduced some modifications to reduce the execution time and to improve the success per tries ratio. In the first two paragraphs we briefly describe the basic algorithm and then the modifications adopted. Successively, we describe the data and the parameters defined to evaluate the performances of the algorithms. The last paragraph contains the discussion of the results obtained.

Reshaping the Structure of Learning Objects in Light of Metacognition

This paper is aimed to re-discuss the organization of learning objects in the realm of current research on metacognition. After a discussion on the structure of learning objects in the light of current standardization initiatives, a new model is proposed that explicitly introduces the representation of the learning design, expressed in terms of a metacognitive framework and of navigational aids. Then, an example of the proposed structure put in practice is discussed by showing the metacognitive framework for a learning object devoted to the fan-plate system (a basic experiment in a course on automatic controls). In the last section, a learning content management system currently under development, which natively implements our model of a learning object, is presented.

Process to process communication in prolog

Purpose of this paper is to present an extension to LPA-MacProlog that allows the programmer to build communication-based applications. A simple set of primitives to open and close communication, and to send and to receive messages to other processes running in Prolog on different machines connected over an AppleTalk network, have been provided. A great design effort has been made in order to grant full independence of the communication layer from the domain: therefore, the proposed paradigm may be easily ported under different interpreters providing a powerful and inexpensive tool to implement process to process communication.

Content Management Systems For E-learning:An Application

This paper discusses our approach to the tailoring of an open source Content Management System to use it as a Learning Content Management System, by providing modules for the management of Learning Objects and for their retrieval and indexing via Metadata. Both the description of what a Content Management System is and the key requirements that a Learning Content Management System must posses will be presented in the paper. Then, a working definition of Learning Object will be provided, and finally we will show how this model can be implemented using MD-PRO.

Preliminary results from a machine learning based approach to the assessment of student learning

We describe a possible approach to the problem of extracting knowledge from the analysis of questionnaires through machine learning. The idea guiding our research was to investigate the existence of association rules among the topics covered in a course. The data used came from the questionnaires administered to the freshmen in electronic engineering attending the course of foundation of computer science at our university. Each questionnaire was coded into feature vectors that were classified with respect to the grade obtained by the student and analysed with C4.5. Some statistical results and hints for further work are discussed.

A Communication Paradigm for Voluntary Collaboration

Abstract In this paper a conceptual model of inter-agent communication, able to support cooperation among autonomous agents in a multi-agent environment, is presented. It introduces the new paradigm of voluntary collaboration, that is to say, collaboration spontaneously offered by one agent to another, in absence of an explicit request, when an agent evaluates such behaviour capable of enhancing the global problem solving efficiency of the whole system. We illustrate the relevance of this topic within the context of coordination in a multi-agent environment, and present the three-level definition (messages, protocol, and strategy) of the model, giving also an example of application.