Self-Assessment of Learning Using Intelligent Interactive Worksheets

Introducing new technologies in the classroom experience for students has been rapidly increasing. Tools that are functional and available on demand for students are even more essential. The focus of this paper is to determine the effectiveness of an intelligent interactive self-assessment worksheet to help students in a sophomore-level engineering course learn material. Often, when students are assigned classroom readings to be completed outside of class, they are not always able to adequately assess if the information read was retained or completely understood. The self-assessment worksheets developed can be used as an aid for the students to check their understanding of the reading and learn how to appropriately conduct problems that correspond to the selected reading. These worksheets not only help the student grasp the main concepts needed to obtain an understanding of the material but also serve as a way for the students to come to class prepared and ready to ask further thought provoking questions pertaining to the reading. With the Maple platform, the worksheets are developed to provide intelligent feedback to students based on the input they provide instead of simply generating a statement detailing if the answer was correct or incorrect or providing a long list of common errors. The worksheet tutorials are created with an aesthetically pleasing layout and provide the students with help buttons and self-check assessment reasoning. This approach to learning engineering material can be useful to all levels of students, from students who are new to the material to students using the worksheets as quick reviews before exams for example. The main goal of an interactive self-assessment worksheet is to assist students in following along with pre-class reading and providing a useful aid in learning the material to help them come to class prepared. The paper will detail the testing used in creating the worksheets as well as the evaluation performed by students completing the sophomore-level engineering course and the impact of the worksheets on their learning.