Yes / 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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/10186 |
| Date | 09 March 2016 |
| Creators | Suleiman, Iyad, Arslan, M., Alhajj, R., Ridley, Mick J. |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Accepted Manuscript |
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