On September 17th, twenty participants came to Tilburg for the kick-off of ‘Checking open questions with the help of AI’. The main office of Ons Middelbaar Onderwijs, an association of schools in secondary education in Noord-Brabant, provided a space for employees of CitoLab, Roncalli Scholengemeenschap, Aloysius de Roosten and NOLAI. It was not just a celebration of the start of this ambitious co-creation project, but there was also time to look at dreams, expectations, and aims.
Kick-off co-creation project ‘Checking open questions with the help of AI’
Teachers experience checking to be a time-consuming and uninteresting task. Particularly when it comes to open questions. Smart technology can help in this task and can even serve to consistently mark answers correct or incorrect.
Innovating checking
After an introduction round, it quickly became clear how motivated the project members were to get started. This co-creation project is special because there is not just one, but two schools that are participating in its development. “More teachers and thus more variation,” project leader and researcher Eva de Schipper of CitoLab says. “We were already working on developing CheckMate to help teachers in checking open questions. We would like to test various versions of this prototype at schools.”
During her presentation, Eva demonstrates how CheckMate works. The students are presented with a question on the screen and write their answers in a textbox. “This tool compares the students’ answers with one another. If they are similar enough, they will be grouped together. If they are also similar to the correct answer, they will receive a green label that waits for the teacher’s final approval. The application works well with a word or short sentences. That is why we start with biology and geography, considering that answers in these courses can be short and simple. We are currently working on improving the algorithm so it will be able to check longer answers.
Collecting questions and ideas
Participants discuss with one another after the break. They write their dreams on Post-Its and vote on the best ideas. Saving time, workload reduction, and consistent grading sound like good reasons to ask AI for help in checking. However, some teachers have a preference for exams on paper. It is easy to mark parts of an answer, write a check, or deduce how a student got to a certain answer; the question is how a digital environment will work with such factors.
Others see opportunities. A digital environment can help students prepare for their test or categorise and analyse their answers afterwards in order to improve their learning and testing process. “As we develop our prototypes, questions arise. It is good and fun to hear the teachers’ needs. That is how we discover questions that we had not yet thought of ourselves,” Patrick de Klein, product designer at CitoLab, says. “If you know the problem well, you can provide a better solution. It makes our job easier if we know where exactly the difficulties are,” Romy Noordhof, head of team prototypes at CitoLab, adds.
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