Using Twitter as a Diagnostic Teaching and Learning Assessment Tool Bahar Karaoğlan # , Cemre Candemir # , Elif Haytaoğlu # , Gül Boztok Algın # , Sercan Demirci # # International Computer Institute, Ege University Izmir, Turkey, 35100 {bahar.karaoglan, cemre.candemir, elif.acar, gul.boztok, sercan.demirci}@ege.edu.tr Abstract— Higher education students coming from different regions and schools have different interests and knowledge levels. These differences can be exploited by teachers to improve the course efficiency. Knowing beforehand the misconceptions and the prior knowledge of the students, the teacher can tune the content of the lecture accordingly. In traditional systems, short essay, multiple choice or true-false diagnostic quizzes that include several potential misconceptions related to the targeted learning, are often practiced for this purpose. This approach reveals the differences in prior knowledge, misconceptions and deficiencies in prerequisite skills amongst the students. The teacher armed with this information can organize both the content and the structure of his/her teaching more efficiently. In this paper, we propose using Twitter as a diagnostic teaching and learning assessment tool. In this scenario the teacher tweets hashtags related to key concepts or misconceptions. The comments of the students are retrieved using Twitter APIs and stored in a local database. The teacher views and analyzes the retrieved data to tune her/his instruction. After lecturing, the same hashtags are sent and responses are collected. Analysis of the data before and after will reveal how much learning is achieved. Besides, this tool will enable instructors to provide some hints to students about the topic of the lecture and engage students more through the use of social media. Keywords— twitter, learning assessment, diagnostic assessment, lecture tuning, microblogging I. INTRODUCTION For higher education courses, the engaged students may have different levels of prior knowledge and also they may have various interests which may affect their personal learning. Since students come from diverse regions and schools, their learning style preferences also may be different. These differences decrease the chance of success of a teaching system which is treating unique to all students. In classical classroom, summative assessments are often used as a technique to measure the level of student’s learning after the completion of a unit or a module. While this is a good way of checking the success of the teaching period, post assessments occur too late to influence the period itself. Recent studies [1]- [3], show that regular use of ongoing assessments, with the aim to improve the course’s efficiency to make it intelligently cover all level of students, gives brilliant contributions for student’s learning results. Diagnostic assessments enable instructors to have feedback about the student’s knowledge and needs. Tuning the course content by considering these data will improve the course efficiency by shortening the already known parts and by emphasizing the deficiencies and misconceptions. Besides, pre-assessments are good means to determine how to teach the planned content according to the student’s learning skills and interests. This timesaving strategy also provides a means to compare the pre and post knowledge of the students at the end of the teaching process. From the student’s perspective, diagnostic assessments provide a way to have information and to think about the incoming topic. It makes students to focus on what the instructors expect them to learn, whilst they create a learning goal for themselves before instructors assess them finally with grades [3]. The classical assessments as well as the whole teaching and learning approaches change with the innovative technologies. According to [4], with the information revolution following the changes in communication technologies, the importance of what an individual knows is shifted to what an individual knows how to find out. Connectivist perspective supports this idea by indicating that the process of learning is enhanced by anything that increases the connections among students and instructors and online resources [5]. Therefore, connectivism theory is somehow aligned with the learning mechanisms using social media [5]. In such learning environments students can have many communication abilities with other students which may lead informal learning by information sharing. Actually, the social media is already one of the daily habits of young pupils, and they commonly use it to communicate easily with a widespread user group and to share and gain information, media and ideas. Twitter and Facebook are amongst the mostly used microblogging social media environments [6]. Recently, this easily accessible platform is considered as a good candidate for a stress-free non-threatening sharing medium for learning assessments. Since new generation students are tightly connected to social media, this can be an opportunity to transfer this habit to the process of learning and teaching in order to enhance the learning process and increase the engagement of students [5]. This opportunity triggers a question arisen in the literature: How can these communication abilities are exploited as a learning environment? Although there are many studies conducted, which aspects of the learning can be improved by social media remains a significant research area [5]. 978-1-4799-4205-3/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE