THE INFLUENCE OF ASSESSMENT TYPE ON STUDENTS KNOWLEDGE LEVEL – A CASE STUDY

Students, during their studies take various courses containing theoretical modules (lectures, exercises, seminars) and practical ones (laboratories, projects). Each course is designed in such a way to give students knowledge and skills. The level of knowledge or skills depends on the course form, trainer experience and involvement and assessment type. The goal of this paper is to examine if there is a serious influence of the assessment form on students’ knowledge and skills.

To confirm or reject this statement we have put four working hypotheses:
H1: Student friendly assessment type allows for obtaining higher skills than the unfriendly one;
H2: Student friendly assessment type improves permanent knowledge memorization;
H3: A few tests during a semester, covering parts of course and allowing material review, cause better knowledge memorization than one final exam covering all course material;
H4: Short tests before practical classes motivate students to be better prepared for classes.

To confirm these hypotheses we have surveyed a group of 27 Computer Science students to ask them about their experiences in the research area. Students have experiences with the following types of assessment types:
• final exam – one exam, at the end of semester, including the whole course content,
• colloquium – an exam including a part of course content (usually a half),
• final project – one big project, rated at the end of semester,
• short test – usually done before laboratories to verify how well students are prepared to do the tasks in the lab,
• reports – written documents describing the particular task realization in a lab; on the base of report teacher gives a grade.

The results, obtained in the survey analysis, revealed that students pointed projects and reports containing practical problems solving as friendly types of assessment. They also noticed that projects and reports allow for easy skills gathering. This is because both of them concern practical case fulfil. A survey about knowledge memorization gave ambiguous results. Various assessment forms were considered by students as these ones whose allow for the best knowledge memorization. Amazingly students did not pointed small tests as the best form of assessment, although this allows for learning smaller parts of the course content and for knowledge repetition. Also the short tests before practical classes arouse controversy. Only a part of students confirmed that this form of assessment motivated them to be better prepared for classes. Short tests before practical classes were also rarely pointed as helpful in knowledge memorization. In the opposition to the above, the statistical analysis of grades obtained by students on final test proved that students who had short tests before practical classes got better rates.

Obtained results proved that the form of assessment influences the students’ knowledge and skills level.