Influence of the students' learning strategy on the evaluation scores

When developing an adaptive system, it is important to know not only the students' cognitive state to determine what they know about a subject, but also how their learning strategies influence on their scores and marks. In this work, we describe an experiment by using the e-valUAM Computer Adaptive Testing tool for self-evaluation to analyze the students' learning strategies in order to check their influence on the correct acquisition of knowledge. To examine the students' learning strategies, we have measured many parameters, such as the number of self-evaluation attempts through the application and the scores obtained through the guided learning process. We have concluded that, in most of the cases, students tend to learn only those specific questions shown in the tests and this fact does not depend on their learning strategy. We conclude that it is necessary a great number of questions for any self-evaluation tool used through the learning process. When it is not possible to get a reasonable number of questions, our study suggests that it is a better strategy to divide the full set of questions in different groups, which will be added to the application dynamically as the students' scores reach the maximum.