Abstract:

In most sciences the main goals are that the students learn and understand certain concepts about the environmental world and that they be able to combine the concepts with the mathematics in the successful solution of problems presented to them. Thus practical exercises are the best way to assess this type of scientific and technical knowledge, being also a form to obtain skills capacities. This is a training that, as in the sports world, results to be essential and improves efficiency. However, problem solving activities require a significant amount of staff time and effort for setting and marking this type of work. In this respect, the use of on-line quizzes can be helpful, but on-line quizzes present also an important drawback: the need of a big initial effort. If quizzes consist in multiple questions chosen randomly from a pool, many questions need to be selected and prepared. The aim of this study is to describe a staff's collaborative work creating a questions database for quizzes and the corresponding administration and exportation protocol. The initial effort is made in the creation of the question database and next in the preparation of on-line quizzes using this database. The final result is a collection of multi-propose quizzes which are available to all the professors who have participated.

Keywords:

Database questions, on-line assessments, multiple choice quizzes, problem-solving skills, e-learning.