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Assessment has been defined as an authentic method that plays an important role in evaluating students’ learning attitude in acquiring lifelong knowledge. Traditional methods of assessment including the Computer-Aided Assessment (CAA) for mathematics show limited ability to assess students’ full work unless multi-step questions are sub-divided into sub questions. This issue persisted significant drawback especially within the notion of method marking approach. To address this issue, the aim of the study is to develop a methodological framework that will create an information and communications technology (ICT) artefact prototype. The prototype (termed as method marking assessment (MMA) artefact) implements a method-marking assessment concept to assess through multi-step questions. Extensive literature reviews have revealed that there are features in common between complex-problem solution characteristics and multi-steps questions assessment using ICT; therefore complex problems paradigm is used in the study for developing the MMA prototype.

The knowledge of design science research (DSR) can have applications for improving expert systems (ES) development research. Although significant progress of utilising DSR has been observed in particular information systems design – such as decision support systems (DSS) studies – only rare attempts can be found in the ES design literature. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the use of DSR for ES design. First, we explore the ES development literature to reveal the presence of DSR as a research methodology. For this, we select relevant literature criteria and apply a qualitative content analysis in order to generate themes inductively to match the DSR components. Second, utilising the findings of the comparison, we determine a new DSR approach for designing a specific ES that is guided by another result – the findings of a content analysis of examination scripts in Mathematics. The specific ES artefact for a case demonstration is designed for addressing the requirement of a ‘wicked’ problem in that the key purpose is to assist human assessors when evaluating multi-step question (MSQ) solutions. It is anticipated that the proposed design knowledge, in terms of both problem class and functions of ES artefacts, will help ES designers and researchers to address similar issues for designing information system solutions.

Information and communication technology (ICT) tools are ineffective when assessing solutions of questions with more than one step. ICT tools assessing these types of questions are paralleled to solving complex problems. This conceptual paper describes the method that will be adopted to create rule based expert system (ES) prototype implementing method marking concept (MMC) in assessing multi-step questions (MSQ) solutions. Pragmatist views and mixed methods will be used to conduct document analysis using undergraduate students' solutions to past examination papers and related findings from previous research. Design science research paradigm and ES development phases will be used to design, construct and evaluate an artifact based on ES. The expected functioning ES artifact will enhance the authenticity of assessment, because evaluation of solution strategies in MSQ solution reveals how much the comprehension of the domain under evaluation is shown. The artifact and the conceptual framework can be applied to a similar domain with modifications or as it is.