A Wizard For Padi Assessment Design (Padi Technical Report 11)

Abstract

The Principled Assessment Designs for Inquiry (PADI) project includes a design system that provides a structure for assessment designs, intended to support and encourage assessment designs with clear rationales. This PADI structure can be summarized as a template of an assessment design with many parts. Designing an assessment becomes, in essence, filling in a template intelligently and making all the choices and interconnections among the various parts of the template. For an analogy to a template, consider a U.S. federal income tax form, which must be filled out by understanding the interconnected rules and assorted constraints. To mediate the complexity, popular tax software provides an interview format, where filling out the form is reduced to answering a series of questions. Likewise, the PADI design system has a means to create and conduct interviews, or wizards, which prompt for decisions about assessment design. In a first prototype, we implemented a wizard that prompts for some selection criteria, eventually matching the answers supplied by the interviewee to an existing template that already has a substantial amount of information entered. This matching template is then duplicated and can be customized further by the assessment designer who uses the system. This report includes an overview of the purpose and implementation of the wizard system, along with brief discussions of the initial impressions by assessment designers who have used it.