Both students and teachers can win!
The Relevance of Online Testing Tools for Teachers
Anyone who has ever taught can attest to the vast number of hours consumed by planning and delivering class content. Add the need for student assessment, and a teacher's job can become overwhelming.
Assessment can be difficult, in part, because there are multiple methods:
- Diagnostic assessments identify what students already know and understand about the topic.
- Formative assessments identify when students are grasping the topic and what needs to be reviewed.
- Summative assessments are performed at the end of the lesson and are the most common forms of evaluation.
Online testing tools are great for diagnostic assessments by using "computer-adaptive testing" (Hovland, 2005). "Computer-adaptive testing" is when, dependent upon student response to previous questions, harder or easier questions are delivered next. This type of testing gives educators pinpoint accuracy on where their students' strengths and weakness lie. Online testing is also a great way to familiarize students with the material. This formative assessment also identifies when students are grasping the material. A 2009 study has shown that "high exposure to the online instrument robustly leads to higher student learning" (Angus & Watson, 2009). Summative assessments could also be administered online, but it is the belief of this author that authentic tasks are better suited for these end-of-unit assessments.
What can you do with Online Testing Tools?
Tests are a big part of school life. As a teacher, the testing process can be very time consuming. Online testing tools can assist, simulate, and make testing more efficient:
- Test Creation can be simplified by several features common in online testing tools. Most tools allow items to be copied with little effort, templates can allow for simpler organization of many similar questions, and all online tests handle the formatting of questions and options. Some tools can even automatically randomize multiple-choice questions, making cheating more difficult and guessing less rewarding.
- Test Giving: Online testing tools can take the place of a proctoring, freeing up the teacher’s time. Students can benefit from the added flexibility of online testing, since there is rarely a need for the students to take the test at exactly the same time and no need for them to take a test at the same place. Often, features of the web browser or computer operating system, such as text magnification or text-to-speech, can simplify providing the test to students with disabilities.
- Test Grading: For certain kinds of tests, students may be able to receive instant scoring and feedback on their submitted tests. Almost all online testing tools offer an organized data file with the students’ answers.
- Test Result Analysis: Some testing tools offer statistical analysis, which can simplify vetting new tests for validity or reliability, help the teacher quickly identify struggling or excelling students, and give the teachers a broad view of the performance of the test.
What types of questions can you create?
A decent online testing tool should support the creation of the following, traditional test question types:
- Multiple-Choice: Multiple-choice questions include a set of responses. For each question, a student must choose the best response.
- True/False: With true/false questions, a student is given a sentence to read, and must decide whether the sentence is true or false.
- Fill-in-the-Blank: Fill-in-the-blank questions are sentences with key words missing. A student must fill in the missing word or phrase. A student may be given a list of answer words to choose from or be limited to a certain number of acceptable answers
- Short-Answer/Essay: Short-Answer/Essay questions are answered by writing a few sentences to a few paragraphs. Written answers help test whether a student has a deep understanding of the subject.
- Matching: Matching questions include multiple queries across from multiple responses. For each query students must select one choice from the response list. There are a few variations of this question type: all responses are used once, some responses are not used, and responses may be used more than once.
References:
- Hovland, E. (2005, March-April). Online testing - a look into the near future.. Media Methods, 13, Retrieved from www.media-methods.com.
- Angus, S. D., & Watson, J. (2009). Does Regular online testing enhance student learning in the numerical sciences? robust evidence from a large data set. British Journal of Educational Technology , 255(18).