posted on 2006-05-23, 17:39authored bySean Wellington, Su White, Hugh C. Davis
e3an1 is a HEFCE funded collaborative project to develop a network of expertise in
assessment issues within electrical and electronic engineering (EEE). A major focus
of this project is the development of a testbank of peer-reviewed questions for use
both in formative and summative assessment. The resulting testbank will contain
thousands of well-constructed and tested questions and answers from which
teachers may select questions appropriate to their students' needs. During Autumn
2000, consultants (subject specialists) from the partner institutions met to identify
important learning outcomes for their subject specialism, and then produced sets of
appropriate questions (and model answers) to assess those learning outcomes.
The paper will focus on the techniques employed to get academics to contribute to
the testbank. It describes the process employed to generate peer-reviewed
questions in the first phase of the project. It relates our experiences of recruiting and
training subject Specialist consultants were drawn initially from the partner
institutions. Subject teams were established and these agreed key curriculum areas
and coverage of the testbank for each particular theme. Authors used MS-Word
templates to enter their questions, and these templates also required the authors to
enter metadata - information about the questions such as the subject the question
examines, the level of the question, the type of question, the cognitive skills required,
the time expected etc. This information was used in the database to design an
interface to allow teachers to select appropriate sets of questions from the testbank.
Experiences of writing and codifying questions, particularly in terms of ascribing
attributes such as cognitive level will be discussed, also the peer review process that
was adopted.A surprising but pleasing outcome of the work of the subject teams was
that there was little disagreement about the required content of the questions and when the questions were reviewed there was agreement about the standard they
represented.
History
School
University Academic and Administrative Support
Department
Professional Development
Research Unit
CAA Conference
Pages
35799 bytes
Citation
WELLINGTON, WHITE and DAVIS, 2001. Populating the Testbank: Experiences within the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Curriculum. IN: Proceedings of the 5th CAA Conference, Loughborough: Loughborough University