Online Evaluation System for Teachers

Chapter 2: REVIEW OF LITERATURE

This paper proposes a new design for a document evaluation system that encourages users to freely submit critical comments so as to increase the information content and value of any communication, and that also maintains the orderliness of interactions.
Index Terms—Critical Evaluation, Ordered Discussion, Document Selection, Anonymity, Communication System.
High level decision making or judgment often needs frank communication involving critical evaluation. From this point of view, it would be reasonable to create a communication system that doesn’t restrain, but encourages the free expression of critical evaluation; however, it is also desirable that the system has a mechanism that helps to prevent chaotic situations full of context-less and slanderous statements that hinder cool-headed and open discussion. This paper presents a new design for a system that can support users to make critical evaluations and comments and at the same time maintains autonomous order among participants; particular attention is paid to usage in fields where communication involving open and critical evaluation is essential, such as book-reviewing. We will illustrate typical aspects of the problem and the design to solve them using a specific example of document evaluation where both each individual and a whole group have to make decisions concerning document selection. We selected document evaluation as our subject, as this would be a less emotive subject for participants to discuss than other more volatile subjects such as events in the political and financial fields. That is to say, we evaluated the subject of document evaluation as an adequate first subject, presenting a suitable degree of difficulty to establish a method for the maintenance of well-ordered discussion. As suitable candidates to benefit from the method, this study focuses on small organizations whose population ranges from tens to hundreds. They are expected to be organizations that have clear borders to separate members who belong to the organizations and outsiders, such as corporations or schools in the real world. On the other hand, to maintain orderly discussion, an approach employing the “establishment of group rules and the automation of their enforcement” is used. Although this paper illustrates the new system design by using a specific example of document evaluation, the design is introduced here simply as a prototype and is also concerned with its application in various other fields that need communication involving critical evaluation for high level decision making. The structure of this paper is as follows: the second section illustrates an example of document evaluation and sets out the typical problems that need to be solved in the system designing of this paper. The third section explains the basic design approaches to solve these problems. The fourth section proposes details of supporting methods for critical evaluation and supporting methods for keeping well-ordered discussions. The second and third sections are mainly written by Iwai and the fourth section is mainly written by Masaki and Yoshizaki.