The setting, marking and providing feedback on assessments form an important part of a tutor's role. Studies into the use of feedback and how it is interpreted by students indicate a mismatch between what students are looking for and what tutors think they are giving. Tutors comment that students are more interested in the mark than the feedback,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of constructivism on assessment approach, where the type of question (true or false, multiple-choice, calculation or essay) is used productively. Although the student's approach to learning and the teacher's approach to teaching are concepts that have been widely researched, few…

The vast majority of second language teachers feels confident about their instructional performance and does not usually have much difficulty with their teaching thanks to their professional training and accumulated classroom experience. Nonetheless, many second language teachers may not have received sufficient training in test development to…

This work starts with a brief overview of education in developing countries, to contextualise the use of the guidelines. Although this document is intended to be a practical tool, it is necessary to include some theoretical analysis of the concept of online assessment. This is given in Sections 3 and 4, together with the identification and…

The recent National Students Survey showed that feedback to students was an ongoing problem in Higher Education. This paper reports on the extension of our past research into the provision of automated feedback for objective testing. In the research presented here, the system has been further developed for marking practical and essay questions and…

This article describes ten key assessment practices for advancing student learning that all professors should be familiar with and strategically incorporate in their classrooms and programs. Each practice or concept is explained with examples and guidance for putting it into practice. The ten are: learning outcomes, performance assessments,…

Presents a brief history of objective tests and their characteristics and limitations as compared to essay tests. (CP)

While today's curriculum is largely driven by standards, many teachers find the lack of specificity in the standards to be confounding and even intimidating. Now this practical book provides middle and high school teachers with explicit guidance on designing specific objectives and developing appropriate formative and summative assessments to…

This study examined the relationship between direct (essay) and indirect (objective) assessment of writing skills using 320 college students in remedial courses as subjects. Correlations and results of factor analysis are discussed. (MT)

Presents expert advice on how to write effective tests and offers suggestions for teaching children how to take tests. (JMB)

This report deals with the effects of an individual's expectations regarding how he will be tested on what he does during learning and what gets stored in memory. It is maintained that essay exams requiring recall are preferable to objective (recognition) tests. There are some bits of empirical evidence as well as some theoretical reasons to…

This report is the result of a study in the fall of 1971 of equivalency testing in English for entering freshmen in California state colleges. The author argues that equivalency testing must satisfy two conditions: (1) the tests should be college level ones, valid for their stated purposes and properly normed, and (2) the tests should be…

Discusses educational standards and accountability at open-door colleges. Suggests that reading, organizing, synthesizing, and writing skills are of prime importance and that, in order to strengthen these skills, at least one-third of all course testing should use a subjective format. (DR)

Essay questions have been a stable fixture of teacher assessment activity for decades. Assessment reforms of the early 90's encouraged the development and use of "newer" forms of assessment including portfolios, performance tasks, and authentic assessments. As of late, however, there appears to be a regressive emphasis toward the use of…

The assumptions behind secondary school literature course tests--whether asking students to recall aspects of literary works, to relate literary works to each other, or to analyze unfamiliar literary works--are open to question. They fail to acknowledge some of the most important aspects of literature which, if properly taught, should provide a…