DIGITAL LIBRARY
EVALUATION AND SELF-ASSESSMENT SYSTEMS FOR VIRTUAL TEACHING: MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONNAIRES
University of Vigo (SPAIN)
About this paper:
Appears in: EDULEARN11 Proceedings
Publication year: 2011
Pages: 3759-3762
ISBN: 978-84-615-0441-1
ISSN: 2340-1117
Conference name: 3rd International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies
Dates: 4-6 July, 2011
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Abstract:
Education is the process in which the teacher transmits knowledge about techniques and procedures to students. The learning process is satisfactory as long as students have achieved the skills defined in the syllabus at the end of the course. This requires a final assessment in which students must solve theoretical and practical questions, or put another way, the students must solve a questionnaire about the key concepts of the subject. Traditionally, the evaluation of the students was done at the end of the semester. It allowed to get an idea of the abilities the students have gained in the course. However, if results were not satisfactory, little or nothing could be done because the course was completed. Hence the idea of training and continuous evaluation arises. The teacher should monitor the daily work of students who are encouraged to participate in class and are given tasks to solve every day. Thus, the teacher receives information from the education of students on an ongoing basis. Depending on the needs of each student, changes in the program, revision of concepts, exercises etc. can be made. This can be done in a personalized manner for each student. In virtual teaching where there is no physical space-time convergence between teachers and students, monitoring students' education is even more important. The success of training in virtual learning will largely depend on the ongoing work of the students, and this requires a strong motivation and close monitoring by the teacher. Tools for assessment and self-assessment may help to accomplish the student’s motivation and supervision. Among these tools, multiple choice questions are particularly attractive because they can be corrected automatically, which reduces the teacher's job, increases the independence of students and provide an immediacy to education would not have if using another type of questionnaires.

However, the development of multiple choice questions is not easy or obvious. Among the major errors in developing a multiple choice questionnaire are: questions and answers ambiguous, wrong definition of questions, more than one answer may be correct, two or more answers are equivalent, obvious questions and answers, etc. This paper attempts to bring this type of error from real questionnaires used in the evaluation of College students. This paper proposes possible solutions to create good multiple choice questionnaires.
Keywords:
e-learning, self-assessment, questionnaire.