Monthly Archives: March 2011

Feedback for excellent students

I’ve heard/read several things recently about the fact that excellent students tend to get less feedback than others. This is perhaps related to the fact that (anecdotally at least) teachers sometimes ignore excellent students – they’ll do OK whatever, so … Continue reading

Posted in adaptive questions, excellent students | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Repeated and blank responses

The figure shown on the left requires a bit of explaining. The three columns represent student responses at 1st, 2nd and 3rd attempt to a short-answer free-text question in formative use. Green represents correct responses; red/orange/yellow respresent incorrect responses. The reason I’ve used different … Continue reading

Posted in e-assessment, student engagement | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Can formative-only assignments tell you about student misunderstandings?

When I was doing the original analysis of student responses to Maths for Science assessment questions, I concentrated on questions that had been used summatively and also on questions that required students to input an answer rather than selecting a … Continue reading

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More on feedback

Picking up on Silvester’s comment on my previous post…I think it is really important that we stop and think before saying that a student answer to an e-assessment question is wrong because some detail of it is wrong. As with … Continue reading

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More about units

OpenMark e-assessment questions were used for the first time in a little 10-credit module called Maths for Science  that has been running since 2002. I did some analysis years ago into the mistakes that students make, but I’m about to … Continue reading

Posted in mathematical misunderstandings, question analysis, units | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Thank you Google translate

As you’ve probably guessed, I’m English, and aside of a pitifully small amount of French, I am ashamed to admit that  I don’t speak any other languages. Therefore I think Google translate is wonderful, especially since it enables me to … Continue reading

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Units : little things that make a difference

If we start from the premise that we want assessment to encourage and support learning, then one measure of the assessment’s effectiveness is better performance on later summative tasks. Mundeep Gill and Martin Greenhow (Gill, M. and Greenhow, M. (2008) … Continue reading

Posted in e-assessment, units | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Learning-oriented and technology-enhanced assessment

My post on ‘Adjectives of assessment’ omitted ‘learning-oriented’, and to be honest it wasn’t until reading this afternoon that I realised what a  powerful concept learning-oriented assessment might be.  I was reading Keppell, M. and Carless, D. (2006) Learning-oriented assessment: a technology-based case study, … Continue reading

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