CiteULike: rmagf's Beevers

IT was twenty years ago today …

Cliff Beevers — 2006-02-19T02:04:39-00:00

Maths CAA Series: Jan 2006 (January 2006)

Since 1985 a team at Heriot-Watt University have delivered CAL/CAA software to undergraduates [1, 2]. Currently, the CAA package developed over two decades is offering formative testing to 25,000 school pupils on 60,000 courses through the SCHOLAR Programme [3] and summative assessment in an extension of PASS-IT [4,5] in two dozen Scottish secondary schools in a one-year trial. Formative online assessment within the university continues on a number of courses too. This article attempts to chronicle the successful ingredients of the Heriot-Watt CAA software, highlight the important milestones over the years and look forward to future work.

PASS-IT ON

HS Ashton — 2005-04-14T07:05:02-00:00

(March 2005)

PASS-IT [http://www.pass-it.org.uk/] is a project that has brought together the major Scottish educational agencies with a common goal to investigate how best to exploit e-assessment to enhance flexibility, improve attainment and support teaching and learning in school and college education. PASS-IT has experimented with novel approaches to question design and structure, the role of feedback to support learning and the ability of Computer Aided Assessment (CAA) to measure appropriate learning outcomes in a variety of subjects and levels. Central features of PASS-IT have been to investigate the significance of the medium in test delivery following the work of Greenwood et al [1] and Fiddes et al [2] and the evaluations of the use of steps for partial credit Beevers et al [3] and McGuire et al [4]. The major research findings from phase 1 of the project have been communicated by Ashton et al in two recent papers [5,6]. This present article explains some of the findings of phase 2 of the project with an emphasis on the work in Mathematics.

Automatic Assessment of Problem Solving Skills in Mathematics

CE Beevers — 2005-04-11T03:46:32-00:00

(July 2001)

Since 1985 the CALM Project for Computer Aided Learning in Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh [1] has delivered automatic assessment to large groups of students in engineering and science. Initially, CALM used the computer to assess basic mathematical skills/techniques and acquired facts/knowledge. CALM has been proud of its testing capability, providing as it does a comparison of numerical and mathematical expressions as answers. This is well beyond the multiple-choice format favoured in some subjects but not appropriate in much of Mathematics. However, much progress has been made through the design of intermediate steps, the inclusion of hints and the extension of question types. In the SCHOLAR Programme [2], delivered over the Web to 600 students in 44 Scottish schools during the last academic year, more complex mathematical skills have been tested automatically using the on-line assessment engine known as CUE. This paper addresses the advances in automatic assessment with particular emphasis on Mathematics. The capability of the computer to assess more general problem solving skills in Mathematics is explored. The paper concludes with some thoughts on how the subject might expand in the near future.