Pedagogical Cybernetics, Feedback Control, Educational Process, Statistics, Cluster Analysis

The pedagogical cybernetics, which is a particular part of the general cybernetics, is a pedagogical discipline bound with educational processes. As a main practical implementation of this discipline, a feedback control loop can be considered. The feedback control has been widely appeared in many educational strategies, which were published yet. In the other similar cybernetic disciplines, theoretical similarities can be seen, e.g. using the feedback in education. As a further significantly part of cybernetics disciplines, a process modelling can be considered; however, the modelling is widely established in the technical cybernetics, concretely in the control system theory. Therefore, an idea of implementing some cybernetic aspects into an area of the pedagogical cybernetics can be suitable for the advanced practical applications. Extensions of possibility of modelling, which are concretely known from the control system theory, has been applied into the pedagogical research by author of this paper yet. In this paper, an idea of extending the pedagogical cybernetic strategies is proposed. The idea is based on the established feedback control loop in the frame of an educational process with possibilities of statistical evaluation of students for purposes of an identification of skills of a set of students. A teacher could obtain currently a state of skills in a feedback process of teaching. In this paper, the statistical method of the cluster analysis and software tools are contained in a proposal of extension of a feedback control loop as a part of the pedagogical cybernetics. Achieved results could be helpful for an identification of activities in a practice. Presented proposal were applied on a practical realization of a particular educational research with 63 respondents in a course of mathematical arithmetic, where a wide spectrum of various mathematical backgrounds can be seen in the first year of study of observed students.