SBIR Phase I: Providing Tools for Richer eLearning Assessment

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目将研究创建测试构建工具的可行性，这些工具允许学校教育工作者方便地制作和提供测试，从可以即时提供和进行的掌握程度的非正式评估到对目标进行基准测试。 关键的创新是（1）为存储的问题项定义答案分析的能力，以便测试构建者可以提前知道测试可以报告哪些考生可能知道和不知道，以及（2）以实际经验可以用于改进评估语料库的形式表示问题项的能力。 我们的目标是创建超越目前广泛接受的应用程序，完全由多项选择题，包括各种各样的，甚至像游戏一样的问题类型，结合动机和教学有效的反馈，即问题类型，教，而他们评估。 这些是问题类型，例如拖放，匹配，填空句和表格构建器，可能有多个正确答案，没有广泛同意的错误答案干扰因素，并且通常需要更多的经验来定义错误对考生的知识和技能意味着什么。该项目的目的不是与高风险的考试竞争，而是超越目前完全由多项选择题组成的应用程序。 这个项目是第一步，以确定是否专注于提高战略。评估在商业上和学术上都有价值。 多项选择和构造答案考试长期以来一直被证明是州和国家高风险考试的高效工具。 然而，多项选择题的一个问题是，许多选择题并不评估学生所知道的东西，而只是评估学生所展示的东西。 某些类型的学生通常在多项选择测试中表现得比其他学生好。 在一个问责制度提高的时期，设计能够经受住法律的挑战的公平测试项目的难度使得多项选择成为代表大多数学龄人口的州唯一有效、可靠的高风险评估形式。 因为有许多学生的学习环境中，他们的学习几乎完全是由多项选择测试谁没有得到很好的服务，一个显着的贡献，探索性学习可以通过增加学习者可以体验，使评估更本质上有趣，也通过改进类型的形成性反馈提供给学生，教师和管理人员。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will study the feasibility of creating test construction tools that allow school educators to conveniently produce and deliver tests ranging from informal assessments of mastery that can be given and taken on the fly, to tests that benchmark progress of instruction against goals. The key innovations are (1) the capability to define answer analyses for stored question items so that the test constructor can know in advance what the test can report about what test-takers likely know and do not know, and (2) the capability to represent question items in a form in which actual experience can be used to improve the assessment corpus. The objective is to create tests that move beyond the current broadly-accepted applications that consist entirely of multiple-choice questions and that include varied and even game-like question types incorporating motivational and pedagogically effective feedback; that is, question types which teach while they assess. These are question types, such as drag-and-drop, matching, fill-in-the-blank sentence, and table builders that may have multiple correct answers, which do not have broadly agreed upon wrong answer distractors, and which typically require more experience to define what errors imply about the test-takers' knowledge and skills. The aim of the project is not to compete with high-stakes tests, but to move beyond current applications that consist entirely of multiple-choice questions. This project is a first step in determining whether the strategy of focusing on improving .low-stakes. assessments has merit commercially as well as intellectually. Multiple-choice and constructed answer exams have long proven highly efficient tools for state and national high-stakes exams. A problem with multiple-choice questions, however, is that many do not assess what students know but only what students demonstrate they know. Certain types of students typically perform better than others on multiple-choice tests. In a period of heightened accountability, the difficulty of designing fair test items that can withstand legal challenge has made multiple-choice, by consensus, the only efficient, reliable form of high-stakes assessment in states representing most of the school-age population. Because there are many students in environments in which their learning is measured almost solely by multiple-choice tests who are not served well, a significant contribution to exploratory learning can be made by increasing what learners can experience by making assessments more intrinsically interesting and also by improving the kinds of formative feedback available to students, teachers, and administrators.