دانلود رایگان مقاله برنامه های کاربردی سیستم ریتینگ Elo در نظام های آموزشی تطبیقی

Abstract

The Elo rating system was originally developed for rating chess players, nowadays it is widely used for ranking players of many other games. The system can be used in educational systems when we interpret student's answer to an item as a match between the student and the item. In this way we can easily dynamically estimate the skill of students and difficulty of items. We provide a systematic overview of different variants of the Elo rating system and their application in education. We compare the Elo rating system to alternative methods and describe a specific case study (an adaptive practice of geography facts) to illustrate the application of the Elo rating system in education. We argue that the Elo rating system is simple, robust, and effective and thus suitable for use in the development of adaptive educational systems. We provide specific guidelines for such applications.

5. Discussion and guidelines

To conclude, we provide a summary discussion of the Elo rating system and guidelines for its application in the practical development of adaptive educational systems. 5.1. When is the Elo rating system applicable? In educational applications the Elo rating system is suitable mainly for adaptive practice or low stakes testing. The system provides reasonable estimates that are sufficient for guiding adaptive behaviour, but does not provide statistical guarantees on estimated skills (as opposed to well calibrated IRT models used in computerized adaptive testing). The Elo rating system is particularly attractive when we want to build a reasonably behaving system quickly and cheaply. It allows us to get adaptive behaviour without expensive expert input, since the system can estimate difficulty of items (questions, problems) and skills of users just from data. Of course, to be able to learn from data, it needs to have enough data available. As our analysis and previous experience shows, the system needs at least 100 students to get good estimates of item difficulty. Typical examples of potential applications of the Elo rating system are in domains with simple structure: learning of factual knowledge, foreign language vocabulary, or practice of basic skills (e.g., arithmetic). More complex domains, involving for example prerequisite relations among skills, require more involved student modeling approaches (Desmarais & Baker, 2012) or a novel extension of the Elo rating system. The Elo rating system is attractive particularly for medium sized target groups, e.g., elementary and high school knowledge for speakers of smaller languages or company vocational training. In these cases it is usually not feasible to construct sophisticated educational systems by experts, particularly in the context of fast changes of the technological landscape. At the same time these target groups are sufficiently large to enable the ‘learning from data’ approach. The use of the Elo rating system provides a way to implement adaptive behaviour quickly and cheaply.