Learning through Web based Practice Progression Schemes C. Vaz de Carvalho*, Rui Chibante*, Constantino Martins*, Teresa Araújo*, João Paulo Meixedo*, António José Mendes † *Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Portugal vcarvalho@ipp.pt † Escola Secundária de Valbom, Portugal Abstract The PLATINEA project, supported by the Portuguese Ministry of Education, presents an innovative approach for learning Math in secondary school and higher education. Its strategy is based on the use of an online platform that proposes exercise schemes, with progressively more difficult questions and complex themes, adapted to each student’s knowledge, abilities and learning path. The platform, developed in the scope of the project, is based on Open Source tools and has been implemented and evaluated in learning processes in secondary education and higher education. Keywords: E-learning, Mathematics, Adaptive Systems 1. Introduction The difficulty that secondary and higher education students have with Mathematics is a well-known, documented and widespread problem as stated by several international and national comparative studies like [1][2][3]. For secondary students, the fear of Mathematics diverts them from following a scientific or technological academic path, which is causing an enormous lack of qualified professionals in these areas. At the Higher Education system, the level of knowledge required causes a very high degree of failure between unprepared and unmotivated students. There have been several projects and experiments addressing this issue, introducing new technological tools to motivate students and trying to provide a closer tutorial support. The following references are just a few amongst a considerable number [4][5][6]. These tools can take the form of web sites, interactive tutorial applications, quizzes, etc. Most of them failed in their intents, because they didn’t take in account the student’s individual nature, abilities and requirements and addressed the students in a standardized form. Others are just too complex to allow students to keep their motivation during the learning cycle. It is thus necessary to design and develop tools that allow students to create and consolidate their knowledge in an autonomous form, with permanent feedback and support. The evolution of the field of automatic or semi-automatic assessment and testing systems has been directly connected with R&D in intelligent and adaptive systems and agents, like [7][8], cognitive psychology and e-learning and technology enhanced learning, like [9]. The PLATINEA project, supported by the Portuguese Ministry of Education, presents an innovative approach for learning Math in secondary school and higher education. Its strategy is based on the development and use of an online platform that allows students to solve exercises, through an adaptive progression scheme, in difficulty and theme. The scheme is set by the teacher but can be individualized to each student’s level of knowledge and skill. The platform can be used by the students to self-test (formative evaluation) and deepen their knowledge of concepts or can be used by the teacher to assess the students’ knowledge (summative evaluation). There is also the possibility of interaction between teacher and students, through the platform, for instance to provide additional help or better explain some exercises. The platform is also connected to tutorials than can be contextually accessed by the students when they have doubts concerning the exercises. 2. Platform The PLATINEA platform is a Web based tool, developed with Open Source tools, like PHP and MySQL. The basic motivation for these options was to provide the widest possible distributed access to students and teachers, independently of their location, base institution, computer systems, etc. Hopefully, it will mean that a student could study a certain content provided by any teacher from any school and they will probably only meet “virtually” through PLATINEA. But, although a strong focus was given to the learning, the platform is also prepared for use as an “official” assessment tool, if used locally on the campus. 2.1. Background An adaptive hypermedia system is defined as a system that monitors the user behavior and adapts its presentation accordingly. The user behavior is mostly defined upon its interaction with the system itself [10]. In our case, the adaptive system tries to adapt the learning experience to the skills of the user, reorganizing the sequence of the content (questions) presentation according to the answers he