This research aimed to investigate and develop an online system for educational measurement and evaluation with a focus on authentic assessment. The research process consisted of four main stages: (1) analyzing the current state and carrying out qualitative interviews on authentic assessment, (2) developing an online measurement and evaluation…

This technical report describes a web-based platform for assessing school engagement in its three dimensions (emotional, behavioural and cognitive) and the contextual variables which influence engagement (family, teachers and peers). Students answer two questionnaires through the platform. Results are shown online through individual reports on…

Educational data mining is an emerging research field concerned with developing methods for exploring the unique types of data that come from educational context. These data allow the educational stakeholders to discover new, interesting and valuable knowledge about students. In this paper, we present a new user-friendly decision support tool for…

This paper considers the design of assessment for students of design according to behaviourist versus experiential pedagogical approaches, relating these to output-oriented as opposed to process-oriented assessment methods. It is part case study and part recognition of the importance of process in design education and how this might be applied in…

This paper describes a course in programmable logic design and computer architecture as it is taught at the University of Newcastle, Australia. The course is designed around a major design project and has two supplemental assessment tasks that are also described. The context of the Computer Engineering degree program within which the course is…

Project-Based Curriculum (PBC) is considered one of the most powerful methods in the engineering education where each course or courses-cluster is assigned a design project which considers a series of inter-related concepts that have been shown theoretically for the students. Using this approach, the student will gain the required knowledge in an…

In the opening paper in this Special Edition I outlined the major issues that led to the establishment of "project e-scape". The project was intended to develop systems and approaches that enabled learners to build real-time web-based portfolios of their performance (initially) in design & technology and additionally to build systems…

Most innovations have contextual pre-cursors that prompt new ways of thinking and in their turn help to give form to the new reality. This was the case with the e-scape software development process. The origins of the system existed in software components and ideas that we had developed through previous projects, but the ultimate direction we took…

As the use of Information Technology (IT) applications has become more widespread, focus has turned toward applying IT to the learning domain, with policy initiatives aimed at integrating IT with teaching. E-Portfolios have assumed growing importance in higher education as institutions seek new teaching-learning-assessment tools to increase…

In this article I describe the context within which we developed project e-scape and the early work that laid the foundations of the project. E-scape (e-solutions for creative assessment in portfolio environments) is centred on two innovations. The first concerns a web-based approach to portfolio building; allowing learners to build their…

Purpose: To overcome the high manual effort of assessments for teaching personnel, e-assessment systems are used to assess students using information systems (IS). The purpose of this paper is to propose an extension of EASy, a system for e-assessment of exercises that require higher-order cognitive skills. The latest module allows assessing…

The purpose of this paper was to provide information about the virtual learning environment known as PGDnet (the Spanish acronym for "Plataforma de Gestion Docente" or Educational Management Platform in English), which was developed by the innovative education group at the Technical University of Madrid known as "Nuevas metodologias…

There exists a wealth of computing education literature devoted to interventions designed to overcome novices' difficulties in learning to write computer programs. However, various studies have shown that the majority of students at the end of a semester of instruction are still unable to write a simple computer program, despite the best efforts…

Although previous research has demonstrated learning benefits for both instructors and students in the web-based collaborative learning environments, one of them major difficulties is the lack of a practical approach to assist teachers in evaluating the knowledge contribution of learners. A novel method of merging multi-modes of assessment and…

This article presents a review of the literature over the past 10 years into the use of technological interventions that tutors might use to encourage students to engage with and action the feedback that they receive on their assessment tasks. The authors hypothesise that technology has the potential to enhance student engagement with feedback.…