Cognitive chronometric assessment of constructive knowledge: an empirical approach to support formative assessment

A cognitive system using mental chronometry to innovate assessment of students learning outcomes is presented. High school and bachelor students from several knowledge domains are required to use a natural semantic technique to provide mental representations of course schemata contents at the beginning and end of the course. At the end of course, schemata related word pairs due to learning obtained from students´ semantic nets are used to compare recognition times of these concepts against other semantic related concepts. Results showed that specific priming effects are obtained from schemata related concepts after successful learning. Implications to formative constructive knowledge assessment are presented.