Student Consistency and Implications for Feedback in Online Assessment Systems

Most of the emphasis on mining online assessment logs has been to identify content-specific errors. However, the pattern of general "consistency" is domain independent, strongly related to performance, and can itself be a target of educational data mining. We demonstrate that simple consistency indicators are related to student outcomes, and suggest how consistency might be used in an online assessment framework to provide scaffolding to help students in need. (Contains 2 figures and 2 tables.) [For the complete proceedings, "Proceedings of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) (2nd, Cordoba, Spain, July 1-3, 2009)," see ED539041.]