The Asian Conference on Technology in the Classroom 2014 Official Conference Proceedings

The Prospects of e-Kankor Exam Prep System in Afghanistan

Hamidullah Sokout, Kobe Institute of Computing, Japan

Samiullah Paracha, Kobe Institute of Computing, Japan

The Asian Conference on Technology in the Classroom 2014

Official Conference Proceedings 2014
0175

Abstract
Passing the entrance exam to a university is a major step in one's life. Kankor is the
nationwide tertiary entrance exam in Afghanistan. Since the score on the Kankor
assessment test determines the student's sequence of courses, it is highly
recommended to do some test preparation so that the score and consequent placement
are in the student's best interest. However, due to poverty and lack of public
awareness, Afghanistan severely lacks sufficient resource for providing entrance test
preparation facilities.

Keeping the aforementioned in mind, web-based test preparation systems offer greater
flexibility than the conventional ways, as they can be accessed anywhere, anytime. In
addition to using easily found practice materials, the online test preparation system is
the most efficient, dynamic and relatively cheap method to prepare students for the
qualifying test.

In this paper, we have proposed the design of a web-based test preparation

environment, known as ‘e-Kankor Exam Prep System’ to give students the tools to
help them pass the university entrance exam on the first try.

The system is based on an instructional design methodology that features: (i) exam-
focused questions and content to maximize test preparation; (ii) an interactive design
that integrates content with questions to increase retention; (iii) integrated ‘drill and
practice’ exam prep tools to hone test-taking skills; and (iv) test preparation strategies
to help ensure exam success. E-Kankor is a student-focused educational environment
for pass rate success that will be continuously evaluated to ensure that our materials
use the latest learning models.

Keywords: Web-based test prep systems; Interactive design; Learner-centered

design; E-Learning; System architecture

iafor
The International Academic Forum
www.iafor.org

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I. Background

Nowadays Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been applied

in a variety of fields all over the world. As for instance in education, ICTs have
opened up a vistas of opportunities for learners. They have replaced the traditional
mode of paper-based learning that offers a more efficient and effective way for
teaching and learning. Assessments are an integral part of an educational system
particularly at higher school level that is the last door towards higher education. ICTs
have been increasingly used to improve the assessment mechanisms at the high school
level.

National Higher Education Entrance Examination, or commonly known as Kankor

Exam, is an academic examination held annually in Afghanistan. This examination is
a prerequisite for entrance into almost all public higher education institutions at the
undergraduate level. It is usually taken by high school graduates and is organized by
the Ministry of Higher Education of Afghanistan.

Kankor is an old university entrance examination system all over in Afghanistan. It’s
the first screening of high school graduates that helps educational authorities to
determine whether they are capable to undertake graduate courses. Usually those
students can pass Kankor Exam who work hard, and prepared well for the entrance
exam. Though it is clear that all those who complete high school may not necessarily
enter to higher education institutions, it is very common and normal process across
the world seeing percentage of students completing higher school studies remain out
of the higher education institutions. Indeed, Kankor is a very transparent process to
categorize students on the basis of their talents and achievements.

The number of high school graduates has been on the rise in Afghanistan since 2001.
Annually, more and more prospective students taking part in entrance examination.
Last year, around two hundred thousand students have taken Kankor, but
unfortunately, they did not succeed. Moreover, a large number of talented students
remain out of the higher education due to lack of awareness and enough knowledge
about entrance exam especially students from provinces. Last year approximately two
hundreds thousands university applicants took Kankor exam, but only four thousands
succeeded to enter Afghan universities. In addition, the current Kanor examination
system is entirely paper-based, time-consuming, lack efficiency and transparency
(MoHE, 2012).
The other major reason, is poverty which engulfs Afghanistan. Many of the talented
students complete their education in misereres economic condition and due to poor
economic conditions, several talented students fail to comply with Kankor’s
requirement. There are no cheap test preparation facilities available to the poor
students to compete against the students who have rich background. These students
are the only hope for their poor parents against poverty and miseries. If these students
fail to get higher education, implies that the deplorable conditions of their families
could not be changed. Hence, engulfed in poverty and miseries forever. There is a dire
need to have and ICT-based Kankor exam preparation system fairly available to all
masses.
e-Kankor Exam Prep System (e-KEPS), is a manageable and scalable web based
application, which offers a secure and efficient testing solution for both examiners
and administrators an easy to use with instant and credible result. This system hosted

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online examination software using multiple choices is the best test maker solution for
training tests, self-study, and practice tests and more.

In the coming sections, we describe the system framework. We begin the paper with
discussion of Intelligent Tutoring System (Section II) with its related modules. We are
following the paper with related work (Section III) quoting the existing system
examples. In Section IV, we describe the proposed ICT solution follow by system
architecture. In particular, we emphasize the general system modules and the sub-
function of each module. In Section V, we continue the paper with the theoretical
foundation of system, we describe the related theory based to our system. In the last
two Sections VI and VII, we will describe the system evaluation methods and
conclude the paper with discussions of limitation to be addressed through future work
(Section VII).

II. Intelligent Tutoring

Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), introduced an essential package of educational
technology for learners in order to help them to acquire the necessary skills in their
carrier and keep them up-to-date with feedback and instruction. ITS interact with
cognitive psychology to provide the best test environment for various theories
(Nwana, 1990). ITS provide considerable ability according to the needs of students to
interact with learning materials, representing pedagogical decisions and to achieve
their intelligence. It involve five major components that includes (Student model,
Pedagogical model, Domain knowledge model, Communication model and Expert
model) (Nwana, 1990).

1. Domain Module
This module is knowledge-based module which contains the learning materials and
necessary information that has to teach for learners. This module keep contact with
pedagogical module to play an important roles of serving the ordering mechanisms to
student module.

2. Student Module
Student module is the main part of ITS components that establish relevant information
packages for learners and provide a suitable and flexible learning environment for
them. Students using the model tracing process to step-by-step build a solution for
problems. The system that build and keep update the student is called student
modelling that could be static or dynamic. Static modelling based to the initializing of
model that occur only once (usually in the time of student’s registration). In contrast,
a dynamic modelling keeping the information up-to-date.

3. Pedagogical Module
This module provide the necessary information according to the needs of students.
Pedagogical module according to the received information from domain and students
modules makes an efficient engineering effort to transfer the exact information to the
students.

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4. Communication Module
Communication module is an interface between system and user that control the
interconnectivity of learners and offer the educational materials to them. This module
provide the means of understanding in both direction for learners. For creation of
session we need three types of information. First required information about the
model in order to create a session and make awareness of user during the dialogue,
second the required information for the contents of communication and third the
necessary information which explain the purpose of communication. [Gharehchopogh
Khalifelu, 2011]

5. Expert Module
This module responsible to provide the necessary materials according to the level and
ability of learners. This concept is more similar to domain knowledge module
according to the Beck et all., (1996), but expert module is more specific.

Interactions    of    ITS    components    (Beck    et    al.,    1996)

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III. Related Work

e-Kankor Exam Prep System provides facilities for all school graduates to take
evaluate and make ready themselves for Kankor exam in order to join universities.
This system exists in all over the world but not in Afghanistan, and this is because of
war and conflicts that are as the result of illiteracy and unawareness of our people
from such reliable system. Due to improving of science and technology in developed
countries, they are easily using such system.

To promote educational services and to make it available in all over the country,
creating such system is basic and fundamental requirement and vitally important and
easier to manage and better serve for school students to really reach world’s standards
of education which creates systematic and regular preparation exam in Afghanistan.
Most educational institutions and universities use (exam management system or online
examination systems) for their students at undergraduate level. These systems have
become a promising alternative and replacements of traditional once, like the
following we compare some of them:

According to Kandil et al., (2010), system that has developed an Arabic Web-Based
Exam Management System for Mansoura University, only support Arabic and
English languages, provided at undergraduate level only, and does not provide self-
study, and library materials for examiners. Similarly, Hoffman et al., (1996) has
proposed a non-web-based exam system, which cover a small group of students in a
local area network; especially those who are related to computer science. This system
support computer related subjects only.

Likewise, Alhami et al., (2011) has developed an Automatic Code Homework

Grading Based on Concept Extraction, which automatically grade student’s code
assignments. The system proposed only for computer science students, whom related
to programming field in order to evaluate and grade student’s assignments and
overcome the plagiarism. On the other hand, Bonham et al., (2000) proposed an
education web-based assessment and testing system, which evaluate university level
subjects especially physics. This system reduced grading load and help students to
download their information and feedback papers immediately.

Sarrayrih et al., (2013) also proposed a web-based system for basic computer at
university level, which provides security to improve on-line examination system. The
system designed to identify students, using biometrics authentication which supports
the security control and integrity of online exam process. According to (Rahneva,
2004), the graphic editor is designed as an extension to the dynamic test development
tool in distributed e-Testing cluster. This system developed as a multilingual for
creation of circuits and graphics, which have database with testing questions. The
system generates tests dynamically with dynamic questions.

E-Kancor is different with other online examination systems; it will design according
to the rules, policies and requirements of Ministry of Higher Education of
Afghanistan. This system considered for school students to enable them to get ready,
sense a positive changes to their ability and easily join the university.

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IV. The proposed ICT solution: e-Kankor Exam Prep System

eKEPS System is an web-based system, which based on multiple choices question for
Afghan school students in order to make them ready to join Universities.
This system supports many kinds of questions related to Kankor general exam, ability
to grade students automatically and provide various Kankor materials for students.
This system will design with various open source technologies like (PHP and HTML5
for interfaces, AJAX for scripting and MYSQL for database) under the GPL license,
in order to give rights to volunteers to easily bring their desired changes in system.

1. The eKEPS Architecture

The system architecture as shown in Figure 1 is intended to provide four types of
subsystems/ modules to better manage and provide a leaning environment for
students. Each module (see Figure 1), describes bellow:

1.1. Exam Management Module: This part of system belongs to teachers,

who are responsible to do the following tasks.
a. Question Management which includes (preparation of questions,
categorizing of questions, creation of courses, and arrange of question
according to subject and topics).
b. Exam Management which includes (organizing of exam, preparation of
exam and controlling the exam).
c. Student Management which convers (categorizing of students,
organizing of students, and giving the feedback to students).
d. Subject Management which includes (categorizing of topics,
preparation of topics).

1.2. Exam Engine: This part of system related to the students, who are
responsible to do the following tasks:
a. Take exam
b. Manage profile
c. Post comments

1.3.Library and practice test: This part of the system also related to the
students for self-study practice-test and access the library.

1.4.Maintenance: This part of the system belongs to system administrator in

order to keep the system with better performance and monitor the system.

The flowing figure shows the system architecture.

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Figure 1: e-kankor system architecture

The system will provide authentication ability for different users and switch them to
their own page according to their role. All users’ information, questions and answers
will be managed by DBMS; and the system will have the ability to auto grade the
students according to the correct answer of each question.

V. Theoretical Foundation of System

A theoretical foundation for teaching and learning will expose and make a clear
values and understanding about educational skills. It is by making precise the
theoretical principles that we reveal our educational ideals which will have a profound
influence on practice. When adopting and replacing the traditional teaching and
learning with new, it is essential we think through our educational ideals. E-learning
has become the protagonist for change in higher education and brings a revolution to
education aspects, but strong needs for stimulus and a purpose (Garrison, 2011).
According to Bonk and Reynolds (1997), to promote traditional learning to more
effective way, we must consider the challenging activities in which to enable the
learners to recognize the new information for old one, able to gain the appropriate
knowledge and construct their knowledge.
Interaction of learners with models and simulations will bring real-life models and
simulations environment, which will have a positive effect and better influence in
learning method (Kozma, 2001). Computers are only acts as an interface between
users and instructions, which provides the processing capability and delivering of
knowledge to learners (Ally, 2004).

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The aim of this section is to outline the concept and principles of theoretical
foundation which are stand behind of this project and making inferences and
conclusion of e-Kankor.

1. Constructivism
Constructivism is a learning concept which based on basis of observation and study to
explain how learners acquire knowledge and build their internal illustration of
knowledge. The main goal behind this theory is to enable the learners to use their
prior experience and practice to formulate new, more effective and adaptive concepts
in related learning. Using of skills in the way of practice let learners to be more
confident, or maybe changing what they believe. In any case, enable them to construct
their own meaning and interact with something different perspectives and being active
innovators for their own knowledge. [Coperation, 2004] & (Jonassen et al., 1999).
In this theory the role of teachers and peers become as a motivators and personal
resources in which to create a link between theory and practice and adjusting practice
through activity and feedback, to catch the necessary and efficient knowledge.

2. Experiential Learning
This theory based on experience and the impact of knowledge transforming and
catching trough experiences. According to Kolb (2000) “Experiential learning theory
differs from cognitive and behavioral theories in that cognitive theories emphasize
the role of mental processes while behavioral theories ignore the possible role of
subjective experience in the learning process.”
This theory follows the collaboration approaches, which focuses on how the
experiences include cognitions, environmental factors, and emotions affect the
learning process and reflect the changes [Kolb, 2000]. According to Kolb, (1984), this
theory followed the four different cycles, which begins with learner’s experience,
learner’s reflection, conceptualization and finally followed by experimentation phase.
By practice of these phases the learners make inferences of what they have
experienced and actuate them to different behaviors actions. The four cycle of
experiential leaning which are proposed by Kolb describe bellow:

2.1.Concrete Experience (CE)

This cycle of learning focus to the individual involvement in everyday situation. In
this stage the learners emphasize on feeling rather than on a systematic approach of
problems and situations.

2.2.Reflective Observation (RO)

In this stage of learning approach, the learners have enough ideas from various points
of view. There is no specific action taken by learners, the learners would emphasis on
patience, objective and careful thoughts.

2.3.Abstract Conceptualization (AC)

In this stage the environment change from feeling to the more theory and logic-based
environment in order to well understand the problems and situations. Learners keep

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focus on systematic planning and developed theories to make the hypothesis and solve
the problems.

2.4.Active Experimentation (AE)

In this stage the learning become more practical and consider what really works rather
than watching the situation. Learning change the situation by taking an active form-
experimenting, which enable the learners to consider the way to improve and learn
from previous stage (Kolb, 2000).
The diagram below outlines Kolbs’ four stage learning cycle.

Figure 2: Kolb’s experiential learning cycle (David A. Kolb, 2000)

3. Behaviorism
This theory measures the human behavior including acting, thinking, and feeling, to
bring the changes to the cognitive and psychological aspects of human. This theory
support a number of different approaches of teaching that based on teacher-cantered
instruction. This approaches include tutorials, practice, simulations and so on. All of
these teaching strategies combine in an approach called “Integrated Learning System”
(ILS).

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4. Situated Learning
Situated learning theory is another important concept in learning environment that
focus on problem solving skills and based to the interaction of learners with
Computer-based learning environment. According to Lave & Wenger (1991), the
concept to this theory enable the learners to become more active and operative in a
community of practice. Lave and Wenger (1991), argue that learning is not one-to-one
knowledge transaction, it is a social process that help learners to acquire and develop
their meaning in a domain activity.

VI. Evaluation
For collecting of data and developing of this project we are going to use two kinds of
methodology (i).Survey (ii).Learner cantered design. During data collection, I
preferred to use Survey method, which includes (Direct Observation, Interviews, and
questioners) in order to study and attempts to actively solve the problem, carefully
documented and bring positive changes. The survey will be conducted in Kabul and
two other provinces (Herat and Balkh), due to shortage of time, we would not able to
cover all schools, only 30% have been targeted both male and female and the survey
sample size will be approximately (N=60); 30 Male and 30 Female. The more
targeted information will be going to receive from respondents when students fill out
the questionnaire and interview with right people (teachers and parents) to receive
valuable feedback for the questionnaire.
During the developing of system, I will prefer to use Learner cantered design
approach that totally based to education environment and focus to the interest of
students. This approach also provides user involvement, which support the learners
and instructors in using feedback and make deference between practice and theory.
Learner centered design approach has series of intermediate deliverables. Therefor it
makes sure that what is done and what the stakeholder expects.

VII. Future work

In compliance of the current requirements and needs of Afghanistan, studying and
analyzing of existing web based system especially online based systems builds an
image and will find out the effective solution based on regulation and rules of
Afghanistan to manage better and improve educational services and standardize
computerized system. For future work we are trying to overcome the limitation of
system that include user interface; to make it more user-friendly and interactive to
participants. Furthermore, we intend to promote the system to general entrance exam,
consider new features for secondary level schools and have e-Kankor registration
system inside the system as a part of our framework in the future.

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