Online Assessment and Measurement: Case Studies From Higher Education, K‐12 and Corporate

Citation

Mason, D. (2006), "Online Assessment and Measurement: Case Studies From Higher Education, K‐12 and Corporate", The Electronic Library, Vol. 24 No. 5, pp. 720-720. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470610707358

Computer‐based assessment is still in its development stage and educators at all levels are struggling to find the best way to apply the technology. There is a multitude of ways that computer technology could be used to assess student performance: before, during and after a course of instruction. There is also a bewildering array of options for designing and administering computer‐based assessments. There are several established vendors of online assessment software and many universities are opting to go with these out‐of‐the‐box solutions. Others are creating their own custom made software. Added to this, everything in the field is changing all the time. Not just the technology: as instructors, administrators and students get more experience of online interactions the expectations of each group change. The reality is that implementing computer‐based assessment is a complex and poorly understood process, and all iterations raise more questions than answers.

This book is a welcome and timely contribution to this developing field. The editors have gathered together 18 articles reporting on the outcomes of online assessment projects in a wide variety of contexts. There are eight articles based in higher education, five in elementary and secondary education and five in corporate training. The experiences reported cover almost all aspects of assessment: student satisfaction, feature comparisons, implementation issues, teacher education, measurement issues, construct validity, testing models and distribution models. The average quality of the research is high and all the articles are practitioner based using real world situations. The array of applications is very wide, ranging from third grade students to teacher training to post‐qualification professional development. For those wanting guidance to the commercially available software, several articles compare and contrast popular programs, although technology in this area moves so fast that some articles are already out of date. Several studies featured course management software by WebCT, now merged with its former rival, Blackboard. There are several articles written from the point of view of college administrators, detailing the lessons learned from trying to integrate new working methods into an existing administrative structure. Often implementation failed due to conflicts between faculty and administrators, or the planned savings did not materialize. Some cases describe how rubric software and databases can be used to automate mass assessment, and show that the main benefits are not content based, but arise from immediate and reliable feedback. Courseware can be used to try to measure the effectiveness of different distance teaching approaches. One surprising result was that in least one case, the learner‐instructor relationship seemed to be less important that the learner‐content relationship. A case based on interactive training for interviewing criminal suspects showed that computer‐student interaction produced better results than one on one instructor‐student interaction. On the other hand, courseware can be used to improve the work of the instructor, rather than the student.

Taken together, the cases in this book give an insight into the breadth and depth of online assessment, its administration and technologies. The cases also reveal the growing awareness amongst educators at all levels that computer‐based education and training is more that just automating what has gone before. Multi‐media delivery requires matching multi‐media assessment. Traditional paradigms will need to give way to new procedures.

This book will help all educators to benefit from the experience of those at the cutting edge and is an excellent introduction to the issues current in online assessment.