Test-driven summarization: combining formative assessment with teaching document summarization

The diffusion of learning technologies has fostered the use of mobile and Web-based applications to assess the knowledge level of learners. In parallel, an increasing research interest has been devoted to studying new learning analytics tools able to summarize the content of large sets of learning documents. To bridge the gap between formative assessment tools and document summarization systems, this paper addresses the problem of recommending short summaries of large sets of learning documents based on the outcomes of multiplechoice tests. Specifically, it presents a new methodology for integrating formative assessment through mobile applications and summarization of learning documents in textual form. The content of the multiple-choice tests is exploited to drive the generation of document summaries tailored to specific topics. Furthermore, the outcomes of the tests are used to automatically recommend the generated summaries to learners based on their actual needs. As a case study, we performed an evaluation experience of students’ progresses, which was conducted in the context of a university-level course. The achieved results show the applicability of the proposed methodology.