Assessing rhythm recognition skills in a multimedia environment

Multimedia content is an effective tool for enhancing learning and testing, and it is more effective than the traditional paper and pencil presentation format. In order to make educational materials more intuitive, more interactive and more inspiring to students, image, audio, video, graphics, animation and 3D items are widely used in current educational applications. However, they are designed mainly for learning and not for testing. Those designed for testing focus on using simple, text-based formats (e.g. multiple-choice and True/False questions) to assess a studentpsilas subject knowledge rather than on evaluating a studentpsilas cognitive skills and problem-solving ability. In this paper, we propose an interactive framework that uses an innovative test format enriched with audios and videos, for evaluating a studentpsilas skills, in this case musical rhythms recognition skills. Experiments were conducted with human observers and the results verify the feasibility of our approach. The goal of this paper is to advance multimedia research in education by extending its capabilities beyond simple knowledge retention and reproduction, and to model the acquisition of cognitive skills in a dynamic context.