Creating the aspired intelligent assessment systems for teaching materials

Abstract

The core objective of the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum for primary schools is to "enable students to demonstrate their talents instead of just scoring high on exams" around the world. The determining factor in education reform is to declare the competence indicators of necessary educational behavior in primary and junior high school. In the reform process, for all domains, the enriched rate of competence indicators for educational materials and methods is very meaningful. Because educational materials and methods in different domains have their own style, we should evaluate these teaching materials separately. Thus, in this research we propose a novel MCDM (Multiple Criteria Decision Making) framework for evaluating, comparing, and improving the effectiveness of competence indicators in the various publications for teaching materials in primary school based on different viewpoints. The ANP (Analysis Network Process) weights are based on the DEMATEL technique with the MCDM method for resolving the problems of dependence and feedback among criteria. Then, a VIKOR technique with ANP weights is proposed for addressing and reducing the performance gaps for each criterion, thus hopefully improving, re-configuring and selecting the aspired Intelligent Assessment Systems (IAS) for teaching materials. An empirical study of Mandarin Chinese based on this system design of three publishers is illustrated to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results can improve the efficiency and quality of the authored Mandarin Chinese teaching materials and may extend to other Learning Areas. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.