The power of online genetic algorithm in stealth assessment for school readiness

Abstract

Assessment of children for school readiness is a crucial process that requires extensive effort to select the sequence of tests most appropriate for the particular case to be investigated. Indeed, the success of the assessment depends highly on the diversity, flexibility, and comprehensiveness of the tests available and the ability of the applied system to decide on the specific sequence of tests to be utilized for each child based on his/her skills which should be discovered dynam- ically as the assessment progresses. Given the huge search space for the test cases to be utilized in the assessment process, it is preferred to apply an optimization technique capable of finding an appropriate test case that better fits the skills of a given child. It was decided to use a genetic algorithm (GA)-based approach for the optimization process. Any other optimization technique could have been used and utilizing the GA is a personal decision to complement the framework developed for this paper. GAs have been widely and successfully used in various application domains. Fortunately, the results reported in this paper demonstrate the effective- ness of the utilized GA in handling the assessment process to decide on school readiness. Assessment of a person’s abilities and skills is an important task for organizations. Examples include evaluating a child’s readiness for school or determining an employee’s aptitude for a position. The assessment involves various parameters related to the test subject’s aptitude, such as motor skills, linguistic development, or deductive capabilities, among others. The assessment may be conducted by various bodies, such as public education systems, commercial testing companies, and recruiters. To facilitate the assessment process in a systematic way less influenced by the attitude of a specific domain expert, it is preferred to develop and employ web-based assessment systems which integrate the skills of professional domain experts. A recent innovation is an adaptive web-based stealth assessment that analyzes the subject’s skill and dynamically adapts the assessment tests accordingly. A web-based stealth assessment is used for evaluating school readiness of a child by having the child play a series of games comparing the child’s per- formance with a database of performance results for a population. The web-based stealth assessment includes a processor for processing the child’s performance data, for comparing the performance data with the performance results of the population, and for applying a GA to determine the most appropriate next test for the child.