Computer Assisted Assessments
What is Computer Assisted Assessment (CAA)?
Computer assisted assessment is "the application of computers to assessment processes, including delivery of tests, capture of responses and marking by either computer or human marker" (p.56, JISC, 2010). These tests can be used for both summative and formative assessment with most tools providing a variety of feedback and question options allowing for the inclusion of rich media (animated diagrams, videos, simulations) for added authenticity.
Why would I use technology to aid question-based exams or tests?
- Can be delivered on or off campus
- Questions can be randomised and selected at random from a pool (e.g. 10 questions randomly selected from 30)
- Questions can be adaptive with the next question released based on the previous answer
- Questions can include multimedia such as images, audio, video or virtual simulations
- Questions can be marked and a score calculated automatically
- Reduced marking where manual marking also applies
- Feedback can be provided instantly to the student based on their answers
- Questions can easily be reused for another purpose or the following year
- Statistics can provide you with information about questions which students commonly answer incorrectly helping to guide the creation of further learning materials and activities
How do I use technology to do this?
The starting point for delivering a computer-assisted assessment is to decide on whether the test is formative or summative. It is incredibly important to identify if a test is summative as this generally entails a greater amount of work, such as validating questions, testing created questions for scoring errors, checking delivery options and booking labs.
Summative computer-assisted assessment is normally delivered under exam conditions as an alternative to the end of module paper based exam. The student's marks will count towards the final mark/grade for that module or programme. This can be more time consuming than a formative assessment because there are a number of tasks to be done in advance of the delivery date (see the Summative Delivery page for more detail).
Formative computer-assisted assessment is normally delivered throughout the module as an aid to learning. It can be used as a revision aid or a diagnostic tool and provide students with instant feedback into what they are doing correctly and incorrectly. More guidance on delivering a formative test can be found on the Formative Delivery page.
There are three main steps required to deliver a computer-assisted assessment:
- Design the questions
- Author the test
- Deliver the test
The University has a rich 15 year history of delivering computer-assisted assessment and during this time we have developed a useful FAQ page which might answer some of your questions. The TEL team can help you design, author and deliver the assessment, or you can chose to do some or all of it yourself. If you require support from the TEL team please contact the Learning and Systems Resource Team on ext 1720.
References
JISC. (2010) Effective Assessment in a Digital Age: A guide to technology-enhanced assessment and feedback [online], Bristol, HEFCE. Available from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearning/digiassass_eada.pdf (accessed 2 April 2012).
