1,721,211 research outputs found
Continuing Professional Development for the Computing Academic: Wheeling in the Trojan Horse
No full textConducting Examinations On-line
No full textExaminations are often criticised because they do not provide an authentic test of a student’s ability. Examinations are also criticised by lecturers who resent the time spent wading through vast amounts of rushed handwritten scrawl only to be confronted with the evidence that students don’t seem able to evidence under exam conditions that which we were convinced they had previously learned. However, examinations continue to exist because they provide external stakeholders with evidence of what a student can achieve, unaided by others. The authors teach courses in Computer Science. A first year course in programming was previously conventionally examined by questions on programming and theory. A final year course on Web Technology also examined programming and in addition examined skills in analysis and synthesis by essay questions. Following reasonable feedback from students that examining introductory programming on paper was not authentic, we introduced a practical programming-task examination, conducted at computers, supported by multiple choice and short answer questions for the theory. Encouraged by the results we extended our experiment to our final year course, and students sat web programming and essay question examinations at a computer. Our presentation will enumerate and analyse the decisions we made, the pros and cons of this approach and the lessons we have learned over two years of examining this way. In particular we chose to leave the computers connected to the network so that students had full access to the facilities they would normally have when working. Students were banned from using communication software and shared folders, and the only realistic way of ensuring this was careful supervision. The students were generally happier with the experiences, even though we badly over estimated work they could do in the time. The staff were happier as their marking time was much reduced, and they felt the examinations were fairer
Engineering a Testbank of Engineering Questions
No full texte3an is a collaborative UK project developing a network of expertise in assessment issues within electrical and electronic engineering. A major focus is the development of a testbank of peer-reviewed questions for diagnostic, formative and summative assessment. The resulting testbank will contain thousands of well-constructed and tested questions and answers. Question types include objective, numeric, short answer and examination. Initially a set of metadata descriptors were specified classifying information such as subject, level and type of cognitive skills being assessed. Academic consultants agreed key curriculum areas (themes), identified important learning outcomes and produced sets of exemplar questions and answers. Questions were authored in a word processor then converted to the database format. Major pedagogical, organisational and technical issues were encountered, including specification of appropriate interoperable data formats, the standards for data entry and the design of an intuitive interface to enable effective use
Focusing on the Question: an XML Testbank
No full textE3AN [1] is a HEFCE funded project to develop a network of expertise in assessment issues within electrical and electronic engineering. A major focus of this project is the development of a testbank of questions for use both in formative and summative assessment. During 2000, consultants (subject specialists) from the partner institutions met to identify important learning outcomes for their subject specialism, and then produced sets of appropriate questions (and model answers) to assess those learning outcomes. The questions were peer reviewed. It is intended to repeat the whole process again, starting this year, using many more consultants from across the country. The resulting testbank will contain thousands of well constructed and tested questions and answers from which teachers may select questions appropriate to their students' needs. When the questions are ready for use they must be stored electronically in a form ready for distribution. A significant number of these questions are objective tests (multiple choice, numeric answer etc), and such questions may be delivered both on paper and on-line, possibly using dedicated test engines such as QuestionMark Perception or, possibly by using the test engines within virtual learning environments such as Blackboard or WebCT. Other questions are intended for use in contexts such as example classes and examination revision. This paper describes the database that we designed to store and distribute the questions. It examines the issues relating to standards and portability for the database, the issues of moving questions, which include equations and drawings, from one platform to another and the issues of making the database searchable. It also looks at the lessons we have learned and how we intend to improve the processes and the database for the next round of consultants. In the first round of question production authors used MS-Word templates to enter their questions, and these templates also required the authors to enter metadata - information about the questions such as the subject the question examines, the level of the question, the type of question, the cognitive skills required, the time expected etc. This information was used in the database to design an interface to allow teachers to select appropriate sets of questions from the testbank. In order to allow the transfer of objective questions from the database into test engines, the data is stored using an enhanced version of QTI (Question Test Interoperability) which is an emerging XML standard designed for exactly that purpose. The QTI has been expanded to allow the representation of non-objective questions, such as short answer questions and written exam questions. As well as importing questions into test engines, our requirement is that users can browse the questions on-line, using a standard web browser, and can print or export the questions from the browser. The presentation of this paper will include a demonstration of the database in action. [1] E3AN: Electrical and Electronic Engineering Assessment Network. FDTL Phase 3 project (No. 53/99) . Lead by University of Southampton in partnership with Bournemouth University, Portsmouth University and Southampton Institute. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/E3AN
Managing Diversity: Experiences Teaching Programming Principles
No full textThe majority of university level courses offer a similar experience to all students. However in the teaching of introductory computer programming this practice has become increasingly difficult to justify, due to the widely differing initial experience of students. This paper describes an attempt to provide, at low cost, some level of differing experience depending on the needs of the student. The students were allowed to select for themselves which group to join. The experiment was successful in improving student experience and in demonstrating that the students were capable of selecting appropriate groups
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