KAUA

KAUA is a technical framework for longitudinal anonymous surveys – designed, implemented and used by the department of informatics didactics for a number of studies and use cases. It started as a project to elicit personality factors of informatics students. We subsequently incorporated additional questions and designed surveys suitable for different age groups, starting from Kindergarten and Primary Schools. Personality traits, academic self-concept, general interests and interest in informatics are currently implemented in an online survey form. Fundamentally, the project strives to elicit profiles of people in different contexts, specifically profiles of people with affinity to computer science and of people with a lack thereof. This also includes studies to investigate the gender gap in technology related education.

A key factor of KAUA is that participants can be traced with a hash id that can only be created with information supplied by them. This way the participants remain anonymous, but development and change of their characteristics can be investigated by recurring survey completions. An exemplary long term use case is the potential shift in personality traits of student populations, conditional on the study program of different universities.

KAUA plays an important role in the DigiFit4All project. KAUA provides the platform to carry out (personal) assessment questions and competence test items, and thereby enables personalized open online courses (POOCs) for learners on different learning content management systems. This role goes hand in hand with the main goal of KAUA – collecting characteristics of different groups of learners in a long-running context.

Contact: max [dot] kesselbacher [at] aau [dot] at