Abstract—Students, when answering a mathematical
question, may make a mistake in their answer for a variety of
reasons. For example, not reading the question properly,
making a mistake due to carelessness or due to a mathematical
misconception. It is this latter category, which is of particular
interest to us in this paper. When such mistakes occur in
handwritten work then, in general, the teacher is able to
identify the mistake(s) during the marking process and give
written detailed feedback on the student’s script. The
disadvantage of this approach is the time and effort it takes to
mark and to get feedback back to the student. As a result,
e-assessment is becoming a standard means of providing
formative and summative assessment of mathematical
techniques. The research problem that we have identified is
how to detect mathematical misconceptions when students
answer e-assessment questions incorrectly, and how to improve
the feedback provided to the student in such cases. By analyzing
students’ rough paper-based workings for an e-examination, we
have captured mathematical misconceptions made by first year
engineering students. This has enabled us to catalogue common
student errors made by students. By amending the e-assessment
feedback code, students who make these errors will
subsequently benefit from enhanced, tailored feedback,
highlighting the mathematical misconception/error made. In
addition, detailed guidance on how to improve their knowledge
related to the topic will be given. The aim of our work is to
improve the e-assessment experience for students as well as
addressing and tackling misconceptions in a timely fashion.
Index Terms—Common student errors, Dewis, e-assessment,
engineering mathematics.
The authors are with the Department of Engineering Design and
Mathematics, University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom
(e-mail: indunil.sikurajapathi@uwe.ac.uk, karen.henderson@uwe.ac.uk,
rhys@gwynllyw.uwe.ac.uk ).
Cite: Indunil Sikurajapathi, Karen Henderson, and Rhys Gwynllyw, "Using e-Assessment to Address Mathematical Misconceptions in Engineering Students," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 356-361, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).