Editorial by Denise Whitelock : e-assessment: developing new dialogues for

the digital age

Summary made byMagnus Nohr

2013Student e-essesment (HiOA)

Denise Whitelock - The Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, UK.

British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 40 No 2 2009

European Union’s Programmefor International Student Assessment (PISA)

This editorial talk abote concerns Abote PICA considering total large-scale electronic delivery of their current examination system. EARLI (European Association for Research on Learning & Instruction)/

Northumbria Assessment Conference (ENAC), ‘Challenging Assessment’, which was

held in Potsdam, Germany, in August 2008

It is becoming increasingly important to construct a pedagogically driven model for e-assessment that can incorporate e-assessment and e-feedback into a holistic dialogic learning framework, which recognises the importance of students reflecting upon and taking control of their own learning.

Denise Whitelock

Issues that are concerning the PISA group

• the students should not be disadvantaged by any e-assessment procedure and that all test items should be valid and reliable

• Student are most concernd abote: fairness of questions received with the random selection from databanks.

• Worry raised by a smaller number of students was the extra stress imposed upon them when their examination was administered by a computer. Do they have the required level of information technology (IT) skills to meet the challenges required by e-assessment procedures?

‘open-book, open-web’ (OBOW)

• Students, too, are concerned that the format of their examinations reflects the needs of the world of work that they will eventually enter. Any authentic assessment should use technology that is employed routinely in everyday business

‘open-book, open-web’ (OBOW)

• ‘open-book, open-web’ (OBOW) is superior to a closed-book examination. (Williams andWong, 2009) state that cheating is not an issue in their study because the examinations have been designed in such a way as to minimise its occurrence.

• One important factor in favour of OBOWis that it suited students’ learning styles and assisted with the production of a more finesse piece of final work.

http://www.slideshare.net/jembwilliams/open-book-open-web-obow-exams

‘open-book, open-web’ (OBOW)

• The authors state that cheating is not an issue in their study because the examinations have been designed in such a way as to minimise its occurrence.

• One important factor in favour of OBOWis that it suited students’ learning styles and assisted with the production of a more finesse piece of final work.

• The message in this paper is that technology can enhance student learning and performance during summative assessment, but is there more evidence to suggest that setting up good questions with constructive feedback is really worthwhile?

Formative and Summative Assessments in the Classroom

• Timely and constructive feedback which generates a pause for reflection starts to close the gap between ‘current and expected performance’ (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006).

The question: Does e-assessment enhance student learning?

?

benefits of formative online assessment

• The findings from their large-scale study were indeed significant and clearly illustrated that if students studying mathematics undertake regular low-mark online testing, their learning is significantly improved as measured by a final invigilated examination.

• Mathematics is particularly suited to an online assessment strategy and can provide valuable feedback to students studying alone at a distance university (Whitelock & Raw, 2003)

• This type of testing allows the teacher to examine the pupils’ actions and thinking processes than is possible with a paper-and-pencil test.

electronic voting systems

• An interesting paper from Draper (2009) advocates the use of electronic voting systems—used more commonly now in lecture theatres—to trigger deep learning. He offers six potential learning designs based on a multiple-choice question format, which is often associated with the learning of disconnected facts and offers more in terms of student learning than has previously been exploited.

peer-moderated marking tool• WebPA is an open source

computer based tool developed at Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK, which is now a very flexible open source system that Loddington et al (this issue) suggest can be used for any university discipline and any type of group assignment.

• what pedagogical principles should drive new computational developments in this area?

web-based portfolio

• ‘netfolio’ new design for an e-portfolio is described by Barbera (2009) Here the pedagogical principle of social networks (Wellman, 1999) has been exploited and a creative design explored to advance e-portfolio assessment.

• Most significant effects on student performance when using the e-portfolio were upon self-assessment, reflection, goal setting, problem solving, data gathering and peer interaction. Chang and Tseng (2009)

Although the papers in this issue suggest e-assessment can open pathways to student reflection and open dialogues with peers and teachers alike

Denise Whitelock

What are the limitations that can be found in the systems to date?

Denise Whitelock

Whitelock and Brasher (2006), in their‘Roadmap for e-assessment’, highlighted the need for the development of more questiontypes that would support free-text entry responses from students that could be automatically marked, and subsequent automatic analysis could generate constructive feedback.

SCIENCE FICTION?

Jordan and Mitchell (2009) have evaluated a natural language-based systemat The Open University, which has been used to author and mark short free-text assessmenttasks in the science subjects. They have demonstrated that the answer matchingin their system is of similar, or greater accuracy than specialist human markers and sitswell with work that is progressing this concept in the Arts domain (Whitelock & Watt,2008).

NOT SCIENCE FICTION?

These papers encourage us to rise to the challenge of using technology to supportlearning, because assessment tells us so much about the values of any educationalsystem (Rowntree, 1987). Student feedback is indeed an important element ofe-assessment in that it can offer new forms of teaching and learning dialogues in thisdigital age. Let us envisage new forms of e-assessment and then build and evaluatethem.

Denise Whitelock