SCALE: A competence analytics framework

This paper introduces SCALE, a Smart Competence Analytics engine on LEarning, as a framework to implement content analysis in several learning domains and provide mechanisms to define proficiency and confidence metrics. SCALE’s ontological design plays a crucial role in centralizing and homogenizing disparate data from domain-specific parsers and ultimately from several learning domains. This paper shows how SCALE has been applied in the programming domain and reveals systematically how the work content of a student can be analyzed and converted to evidences to assess his/her proficiency in domain-specific competences and how SCALE can also analyze the student’s interaction with a learning activity and provide a confidence metric to assess his/her behavior as he/she culminates toward goal achievements.