Domain-specific formative feedback through domain-independent diagram matching

As part of our Human-Computer Collaborative (HCC) approach to assessment, we seek representations of answers and marking judgements which can be applied to a wide variety of situations. In this paper we introduce such a representation, which we call a gree, and discuss an initial practical application of grees for formative feedback. An experiment was carried out in which students were asked to construct an answer while receiving interactive feedback and then complete a short survey. The results show that it is possible to give effective domain-specific formative feedback based on a domain-independent internal representation or “metaformat”. This work builds on results we have previously presented on domain-independent diagram matching based on heuristic matching of graphs. Grees provide much greater flexibility, with a wide variety of potential applications. We discuss some problems which need to be overcome before we can realise their full potential.