An online testing and analysis system for students' creative problem-solving ability in sciences

Abstract

This paper proposes an online testing and analysis system for studying students’ Creative Problem-Solving (CPS) ability in sciences. Using an open-ended essay-question-type test, students are asked to express their idea and imagine how to solve problems better. Based on previous works, we utilize an automated scorer for evaluating students’ CPS ability. This system serves as a real-time (self-)assessment for online learners and a useful research tool to gather data for CPS studies. We have re-examined the inter-rater reliability of our automated scorer with new samples, and conducted a questionnaire survey for usability inspection. The preliminary results show the system is reliable for automated scoring and satisfactory for system usability. A roadmap for future development is also proposed