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Adaptive Exercises and Formative Assessment for English Remedial Action

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Abstract

The level of fluency in English by Italians is among the lowest in Europe, and most of the Italian students do not reach the language skills indicated by the national guidelines at the end of secondary school. It is important that young people acquire language skills at school so as not to be penalized at university or when looking for work. At the same time, it is important for students to acquire digital skills and use technologies for educational purposes. In remedial work interventions, but also in general in teaching and learning English, technologies can offer important support. The University of Turin has designed and implemented innovative methodologies for remedial work, based on the use of an integrated digital learning environment. The context of this research is an online action for the remedial work of English, which involved 11 classes of a secondary school for 265 students. Our research questions concern the design and implementation of activities and resources within the DLE, their use by students, and their effectiveness in improving language skills. To answer these questions, the online courses, activities, resources, and students’ participation were analyzed in detail. To study the improvement in students’ performance, the average evaluation in English before and after the recovery action was analyzed. To understand if students and teachers appreciated the action and if they considered it useful, their answers to the final questionnaire, completed at the end of the remedial work action, were analyzed.KeywordsDigital learning environmentEnglish remedial workInteractive teaching materialsSecondary schoolTests with automatic formative assessment

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... We define automatic formative assessment as using formative assessment in a DLE by automatically processing student responses and providing feedback [14,15]. With the AAS, it is possible to create adaptive questions with personalized, immediate, and interactive feedback giving information about how the DDL task was performed and the process to be mastered, thus enabling self-regulation and self-monitoring of actions [16][17][18]. The DDL approach gives students the language access keys to the content and, in the case of Mathematics, proves its effectiveness in helping them to understand and manage a language that can pose actual obstacles to problem solving activities and exercises. ...
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... Questo tipo di domande con feedback interattivo e immediato è molto adatto per la valutazione formativa in cui si effettua una valutazione per l'apprendimento, perché si aiutano gli studenti a capire dove hanno sbagliato e a migliorare le loro abilità e competenze, e si propone la valutazione come apprendimento, perché svolgendo quest'attività gli studenti apprendono un possibile metodo risolutivo per il problema proposto. Questo modello per la valutazione formativa automatica è nato per le discipline STEM ma si è rivelato utile anche per altre discipline, ad esempio per l'apprendimento delle lingue Corino et al. 2022). ...
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