e-assessment (f)or learning

Day 12. Monitor and improve. One of the advantages of eAssessment (whatever you mean by that term)  is the ability to monitor actual student behaviour. This is not the same as what students say they do, neither is it the same as student opinion. Student opinion is important of course, but there are real inconsistencies between what students say they do and what they say they want, and what they actually do. The best documented of the inconsistencies is the fact that students ask for more ‘feedback’ whilst not collecting their marked work. I could write at length on reasons and possible reasons for this fact – but for now, let’s concentrate on actual student behaviour. (more…)

Day 11. A broader definition of eAssessment. I can clearly remember the day, around 5 years ago, when I felt rather small at a conference because I was talking about my work with short-answer free text questions, and realised that everyone else was using the term ‘eAssessment’ to mean something rather different. The irony is that I’ve always had far broader interests in assessment  – I come from a tutoring background and my current ‘day job’, as an Open University staff tutor, means that I spend a lot of time getting our ‘correspondence tuition’ (marking and commenting on tutor-marked assignments) as good as possible. I have also been involved in the assessment of wikis and tutor group forum discussions. But somehow I didn’t see this as eAssessment… (more…)

Day 10. Check, check and check again. So you’ve chosen your question type, written your question and feedback and constructed your answer-matching. You may even have put your questions together into a quiz or interactive computer-marked assignment (iCMA) of some sort. So now it’s ready to go to students? WRONG. Checking eAssessment questions and whole quizzes is vitally important and this post considers things such as when to do the checking and who should do it. (more…)

Day 9. Using STACK to write questions to assess maths.  There may or may not be nine ladies dancing, but there is certainly one female blogger who would happily do a little dance around her house this evening. I’ve managed to prise another few hours this afternoon to write another STACK question and I am oh so happy with the result. I feel a bit embarrassed to be writing about STACK and, yes, it did take me several hours to write one question. I am a real beginner, standing on the shoulders of giants (Chris, Tim, Phil – that’s you). In writing STACK questions I am having to learn STACK, learn Maxima, learn Moodle, learn LaTeX, and – as I get onto questions that assess rather more maths than basic differentiation – I will be having to dig deep into my memory (and revise from the module materials which the questions are designed to support) from the days, something approaching 40 years ago, when I might have described myself as a mathematician. But I am loving every minute of it. (more…)

Day 8b. Using PMatch for short-answer free-text questions. As promised, what I’d like to do is to give you an example of the answer matching for a real question, based on real student responses. (more…)

Day 8a. Free text marking of short answer questions.  I’ve already talked about the automatic marking of short answers quite a lot on this blog so today, the first day of 2013, I’d like to do two slightly different things (1) Set our work in this area in context; (2) Give an example of the actual PMatch answer matching that we use for one question. Actually, we’ve been out walking and I wanted to get my other blog written up, so I will only do (1) today, letting the ‘Twelve Days’ slip and ending on 6th January (which some people consider to be the 12th Day of Christmas in any case) rather than 5th. A clever solution and another reminder that assessment questions need to be unambiguous (not like ‘What date is the 12th Day of Christmas?’) and to mark all correct answers as correct and all incorrect answers as incorrect – that is very important for short-answer free text questions too. (more…)

Day 7. Other question types. OK, so you’ve decided to limit your use of multiple choice questions to situations in which you have no option or where MCQs have something specific to offer. What options do you have for other question types? This will depend on which eAssessment system you are using, but I have taken examples largely from the OU’s ‘OpenMark’ system. OpenMark questions can be used in Moodle quizzes – and some of the question types that I’ve used extensively in OpenMark are now available as Moodle question types too. (more…)

Day 6. Making multiple-choice better. Although I don’t, in general, much like multiple-choice questions, I have to admit that they can sometimes work very well. In conventional face-to-face settings, the use of electronic voting systems (‘clickers’) can bring lectures alive as well as informing lecturers about student misunderstandings. And it gets better – we don’t have conventional lectures at the Open University, but we are making more and more use of synchronous conferencing tools such as Elluminate Live! (now Blackboard Collaborate elsewhere) – which has a quiz function. I have seen the quiz function used most effectively to make Elluminate sessions much more interactive. (more…)

Day 5. Go beyond multiple choice. I’ve been reading a lot recently about the pros and cons of multiple choice (selected response) and constructed response questions. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll realise that I am not a great fan of multiple choice questions. I’ve already given some of my reasons, but I’ll attempt to summarise here. (more…)

Day 4. What gift was delivered on 28th December? Thinking about possible answers to this question should help you to identify the theme’s of today’s post, so perhaps I’ll stop writing now!

Some people say that the first day of Christmas is 25th Dec; leading to a 4th Day of 28th Dec and a 12th Day of 5th January. That’s the convention I’ve followed in this blog, but others would argue that the first day of Christmas is  26th Day, leading to a 3rd Day of 28th December and a 12th Day or 6th January. I wouldn’t like to say which of these is ‘right’ – it depends on your culture. So the question as asked is ambiguous – are you being asked about the gift delivered on the 3rd or 4th Day of Christmas? (more…)