Professor John McEwen of Dundee University and Dr. Tom Mitchell of Intelligent Assessment Technologies received their 2009 Scottish e-Assessment Award from Cliff Beevers.
The Scottish e-Assessment Awards recognise excellence and innovation in using e-Assessment, to improve the educational experience of learners.
The 2009 prize for Summative Assessment was awarded to the Dundee Progress Test, developed by The Medical School at Dundee University and Intelligent Assessment Technologies. The Dundee test is delivered on ExamOnline, and uses short-answer free-text questions, developed using FreeText Author.
The following is an excerpt from the successful submission by Professor John McEwen:
Each year, an innovative 270- item on- screen ‘Progress Test’, encapsulating the 5-year undergraduate medical curriculum, is administered to our students. Items, selected from a bank of several hundred submitted by faculty teachers, require a short-answer response. The system exhibits two significant areas of innovation:
The open-ended, non-triggered, nature of the free-text response, which provides no clues to the ‘correct’ answer, has been viewed positively by faculty, as this is similar to the open item and answer dialogue which goes with small group learning and teaching. In addition, the free-text nature of the responses has some resonance with those members of faculty who have previously used old-style oral exams – but who have had to abandon this type of assessment in the face of its poor validity and reliability. By contrast, the computer marked Progress Tests have an alpha reliability coefficient in excess of 0.95
See also: conference and white papers relating to this project
Further information on the awards: http://www.e-assessment-scotland.org