Classification of Students' Misconceptions in Individualised Learning Environments (C-SMILE): An Innovative Assessment Tool for Engineering Education Settings

The COVID-19 pandemic has reformed the teaching-learning processes in engineering education across the globe. Virtual classrooms substituted physical classrooms with the widespread use of online meeting platforms. The proliferation of virtual classrooms not only paved the way for accelerated digital transformation but also brought back some elementary issues in engineering education. Many engineering students face difficulties in comprehending the fundamental concepts in their courses during virtual learning. As real-world engineering solutions depend on conceptual clarity, misconceptions of basic engineering principles need to be taken seriously. If not identified, analysed and corrected with constructive feedback, misconceptions on various engineering topics can create challenging obstacles in learning. Against this backdrop, this research study introduces a novel solution titled Classification of Students Misconceptions in Individualised Learning Environment (C-SMILE). The primary objective of the C-SMILE system is to examine the usefulness of personalised automated feedback to students to enhance their conceptual understanding by pinpointing their misconceptions. Besides, we propose a method by which students' misconceptions can be effectively classified for every instructional objective in every engineering course using machine learning techniques. Our pilot-study results show that the proposed C-SMILE system can precisely classify students' misconceptions in engineering education settings.