Innovation Profile 091
Tests can be a delight
Being tested by others can be stressful and depressing. Testing yourself and proving how capable you are makes you feel good.
Before the advent of ICT, self-testing your knowledge and mental skills was not easy. Paper tests provided few approaches and could not provide feedback, only right answers against which you could compare your answers.
Making online tests available to students is a much more effective way of enabling them to self-test. A wide range of different question styles can now be assessed and marked automatically.
The Learnwise Learning Platform from Granada Learning incorporates Testwise. At http://www.learnwise.com/products/testwise.jhtml you will find a list of all the questions styles supported by Testwise. The automatic assessment processes include such things as:
- referencing answers against model answers,
- assessment of essay-type questions,
- hot-spot and drag-and-drop exercises,
- sliding scales and likert scales,
- and several others.
Computer-based testing is going to get ever-more sophisticated but the tools are easy enough for teachers to use, to create tests. And as large banks of tests of all kinds grow, perhaps with automatic adjustment for the student's capability also helping ensure sufficient success, testing mental learning will become as natural a part of learning as is testing of physical learning. The joy of developing mental capabilities will come from explicit and immediate success, just as the joy of learning to ride a bicycle comes from managing to stay upright.
So what does this mean for teachers? It could mean that teachers marking pupils' work becomes only a small part of the formative assessment feedback that students get on their work. Teachers may be able to monitor automatically marked work and concentrate on helping students to extend their capability to new challenges.
And for the students? Learning Platforms such as Learnwise appear to be having a deep and very positive psychological effect on them, by making both the tasks to be achieved and the student's success explicit - to the student, to the teacher, and to their parents.
The Granada Learning Company Profile on our web site will give you an overview of the company and a list of other Innovation Profiles connected with it.
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If you know of examples of innovative use of ICT-for-learning that others would be interested in, please email innovations@eep-edu.org
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