| Recently,
universities in Japan, in particular, private universities, are
inclined to accept a wide variety of students because the number
of high school students is becoming smaller in contrast to the
increase of the number of enrollment of students. In response to
this situation, universities have been gradually providing pre-classes
before enrollment, various levels of classes, or follow-up classes
after regular classes. However, it becomes very difficult to serve
adequate learning chances to each student because the distribution
of students' skills is spreading like a uniform distribution. We
may need many teaching assistants if exhaustive learning classes
are required. Instead, we have developed new learning systems to
assist classes, called the follow-up program systems, consisting
of learning check testing, follow-up program testing, and collaborative
work testing; they have been working successfully in Hiroshima
Institute of Technology. In these online testing systems, we adopt
the item response theory to evaluate students' learning skills
fairly. Although students' abilities can be estimated accurately
by using a large number of responses to tests, we can also obtain
the estimates for the abilities accurately with the small number
of responses to tests if we use a method proposed in this paper,
the EM-type IRT. This can estimate the response values to the empty
elements during the estimation process. The incomplete matrix can
be modified to the complete matrix. We may expect that this makes
the estimated ability values more reliable. This can lead us to
reconfigure the class design in the early stages. |
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