OpenAnswer, a framework to support teacher's management of open answers through peer assessment

Open-ended questions are an important means to support analysis and assessment of students; they can be of extraordinary effectiveness for the assessment of higher cognitive levels of the Bloom's Taxonomy. On the other hand, assessing open answers (textual, freely shaped, answers to a question) is a hard task. In this paper we describe an approach to open answers evaluation based on the use of peer-assessment: in a social-collaborative e-learning setting implemented by the OpenAnswer web system, the students answer questions and rate others' (and may be own) answers, while the teacher marks a subset of the answers so to allow the system inferring the rest of the marks. The aim of our system is to ease the teacher's marking burden and allow for a more extensive use of open ended questionnaires in her/his teaching activity.