Automatic Question Generation for Repeated Testing to Improve Student Learning Outcome

Abstract

In recent years, educational resources have gradually been digitized, and digital education platforms have gradually become popular. We use AI to accurately assist people in performing daily tasks through a machine learning process. In education, we can use AI in many situations, such as predicting student's learning outcome and discovering student's learning strategies. However, most solutions have not yet utilized modern AI capabilities, such as natural language processing. This research aims to help teachers use machines to automatically generate short answer questions to reduce the time for teachers to write exam questions. In addition, the main reason we focus on short answers is that many studies prove that short answer exercises can enhance student's long-term memory, thereby improving their learning performance. We propose an automatic question generation (AQG) system that combines syntax-base and semantics-base, in order to prove that the system is highly available and improve student's learning performance, we conducted experiments with 41 students. The experimental results show that student’s learning performance has been significantly improved, which means that by repeatedly testing the machine question generation system, students can deepen their long-term memory of course knowledge.