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Formative assessment is considered to be helpful in students' learning support and teaching design. Following Aufschnaiter's and Alonzo's framework, formative assessment practices of teachers can be subdivided into three practices: eliciting evidence, interpreting evidence and responding. Since students' conceptions are judged to be important for meaningful learning across disciplines, teachers are required to assess their students' conceptions. The focus of this article lies on the discussion of learning analytics for supporting the assessment of students' conceptions in class. The existing and potential contributions of learning analytics are discussed related to the named formative assessment framework in order to enhance the teachers' options to consider individual students' conceptions. We refer to findings from biology and computer science education on existing assessment tools and identify limitations and potentials with respect to the assessment of students' conceptions.

Using a Web search engine is one of today's most frequent activities. Exploratory search activities which are carried out in order to gain knowledge are conceptualized and denoted as Search as Learning (SAL). In this paper, we introduce a novel framework model which incorporates the perspective of both psychology and computer science to describe the search as learning process by reviewing recent literature. The main entities of the model are the learner who is surrounded by a specific learning context , the interface that mediates between the learner and the information environment, the information retrieval (IR) backend which manages the processes between the interface and the set of Web resources, that is, the collective Web knowledge represented in resources of different modalities. At first, we provide an overview of the current state of the art with regard to the five main entities of our model, before we outline areas of future research to improve our understanding of search as learning processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of technology for handling information on a Big Data-scale is a buzzing topic of current research. Indeed, improved techniques for knowledge discovery are crucial for scientific and economic exploitation of large-scale raw data. In research collaboration with an industrial actor, we explore the applicability of ontology-based knowledge extraction and representation for today's biggest source of large-scale data, the Web. The goal is to develop a profiling application, based on the implicit information that every user leaves while navigating the online, with the goal to identify and model preferences and interests in a detailed user profile. This includes the identification of current tendencies as well as the prediction of possible future interests, as far as they are deducible from the collected browsing information, and integrated expert domain knowledge. The article at hand gives an overview on the current state of the research, the developments made and insights gained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]