VOLUME 5 ISSUE 2 June 2007

A Novel Approach to Define Performance Metrics for Students’ and Teachers’ Evaluation

Pradipta Biswas and S.K. Ghosh
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India

Evaluation is an unavoidable feature in any teaching or learning scenario. The evaluation strategy of students differs widely throughout the world. Further, most of the institutes do not use any objective technique to assess the teaching performance of a teacher. The present paper defines performance metrics both for student and teacher evaluation and also discusses the methodology for calculating relevant metrics. We have designed a database as well as a data warehouse for storing information about teaching and learning at a very detailed level. The data warehouse can be used to calculate performance metrics for any possible groups of students, teachers and subjects. For example, we can calculate metrics indicating the performance of mid-worker students in a particular course, performance improvement of students during first half of a course etc. In a decision-making scenario, these metrics may help in providing enough insight into the assimilation capability of students and teaching capability of teachers. Once measured properly for adequate length of time, these metrics can also be customized to provide other useful utilities like developing a student model, utility of a course modification, institutional performance etc. The system has been tested for analyzing four courses in a premier engineering institute and the outcome found to be encouraging.

Keywords: education technology, evaluation system data warehouse, performance metric, ontology

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