Monthly Archives: February 2011

Peerwise

Also at the ‘More effective assessment and feedback’ meeting on Wednesday, Simon Bates spoke about the use of ‘Peerwise’ at the University of Edinburgh. Peerwise (see http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/) enables students to write their own assessment questions, and to share and discus … Continue reading

Posted in e-assessment, peer assessment, Peerwise | 1 Comment

Is it worth the effort?

I’m taking a short break from reporting findings from my analysis into student engagement with short-answer free-text questions to reflect on a couple of things following the HEA UK Physical Sciences Centre workshop on ‘More effective assessment and feedback’ at … Continue reading

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Helpful and unhelpful feedback : a story of sandstone

One of the general findings that is coming out of my evaluation of student responses to multi-try e-assessment questions relates to that wonderful thing that I’ll call the ‘Law of unintended consequences’. I used to think that ‘students don’t read … Continue reading

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Computers as social actors

Some of the findings I’ve been blogging about recently (and some still to come) are contradictory. On the one hand students seem to be very aware that their answers have been marked by a computer not a human-marker, but in … Continue reading

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decease or decrease?

Back in 2007, we were observing students attempting our short-answer free-text e-assessment questions in a Usability Laboratory. One student repeatedly typed ‘decease’ instead of ‘decrease’ and he didn’t realise he was doing it. At the time, the answer matching was linguistically … Continue reading

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Spelling mistakes in student responses to short-answer free-text e-assessment questions

I get asked a lot about how the answer-matching copes with poorly spelt responses to our short-answer free-text responses, and this is certainly something that used to worry me. Fortunately all the evidence is that our answer matching has coped remarkably well with poor … Continue reading

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Challenging my own practice

The JISC ‘From challenge to change’ workshop yesterday (see previous post) started with an invitation to record aspects of assessment and feedback provision in our own context that we felt to be strengths or remained a challenge. I was there … Continue reading

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Challenging received wisdom

Our case study ‘Designing interactive assessments to promote independent learning’ from the JISC guide Effective Assessment in a Digital Age featured at the JISC Birmingham Assessment Workshop ‘From challenge to change’ yesterday, so I was speaking at the workshop.  These … Continue reading

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