Dept of Mathematics Education seminar (additional event): 24 November 2022

Dr George Kinnear (University of Edinburgh)

Exploring the use of example-generation tasks in e-assessment

I will discuss two recent projects based on using e-assessment to prompt students to generate examples of mathematical objects. Such tasks have been suggested as an effective way to develop students’ understanding of mathematical concepts. First, I will report on results from an experiment run in an online course in introductory university mathematics. Students were randomly assigned either a generation or a classification task when first learning about increasing and decreasing sequences, with their scores on subsequent assessment questions used to compare the outcomes of the two approaches. Second, I will share preliminary findings from a series of task-based interviews with students. The interviews were designed to explore possible differences in students' example-generation strategies when the task is posed through e-assessment rather than on paper.