e-assessment (f)or learning

We’ve now had two more talks as part of the OU Institute for Educational Technology’s  ’Refreshing Assessment’ series. First we had Lester Gilbert from the University of Southampton on ‘Understanding how to make interactive computer-marked assessment questions more reliable and valid: an introduction to test psychometrics’. Then, yesterday, Don Mackenzie from Professional e-Assessment Services (which I think is a University of Derby spin-off) , with the title ‘From trivial pursuit to serious e-assessment: authoring and monitoring quality questions for online delivery’ (more…)

I’ve been lent a copy of Todd Farley’s book ‘Making the grades: my misadventures in the standardized testing industry’ (published by PoliPointPress in 2009). The blurb on the back of the book says ‘Just as American educators, parents and policymakers reconsider the No Child Left Behind Act and its heavy em

As part of a ‘Refreshing Assessment’ Project, the Institute for Educational Technology at the Open University is hosting three talks during June. The first of these, last Wednesday, was from Helen Ashton, head of eAssessment at the SCHOLAR programme at Heriot Watt University, with the subject ‘Exploring Assessment Design’. It was a good talk, highlighting many points that I bang on about myself, but sometimes we need to hear things from a different perspective (in this case, from Helen’s experience of authoring questions for use by a wide range of schoolchildren). (more…)