Building DMAD: a distributed mathematics assessment database for WME

Assessment of student understanding and performance is important in education. Hence we are building a DMAD for our WME (Web-based mathematics education) system. DMAD consists of databases located at individual WME websites. Each local DMAD database collects assessment questions contributed by teachers to be shared with others. Teachers can search and import assessment questions, edit and revise them to use in tests and assignments. They can also author new assessment questions and contribute them to DMAD to be shared locally or widely. DMAD supports true-false, multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay questions. Correct answers are stored. DMAD provides online tests, immediate grading of student answers, realtime feedback, and statistics of student performance. Questions in a test can be displayed in various permutations automatically to enable test taking by students at close proximity, for example. Incorrect answers for questions can be connected, by the assessment author, to common misconceptions or missing background knowledge. DMAD can help correlate such diagnostic information with WME topics lesson pages that can help students overcome difficulties exposed by assessments. DMAD is easy to use and allows questions to contain text, pictures, graphs, and formulas.