Analyzing Response Times And Answer Feedback Tags In An Adaptive Assessment

While many learning and assessment models focus on the binary correctness of student responses, previous studies have shown that having access to extra information—such as the time it takes students to respond to a question—can improve the performance of these models. As much of the previous work in this area has focused on knowledge tracing and next answer correctness, in this study we take a different approach and analyze the relationship between these extra types of information and the overall knowledge of the student, as measured by the end result of an adaptive assessment. In addition to looking at student response times, we investigate the benefit of having detailed information on the responses in the form of answer feedback tags from the adaptive assessment system. After using feature embeddings to encode the information from these feedback tags, we build several models and perform a feature importance analysis to compare the relative significance of these different variables. Although it appears that the response time variable does contain useful information, the answer feedback tags are ultimately much more important to the models. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.