Computerized Assessment

This paper reports on student's experience of e-Exams as collected via surveys undertaken in conjunction with a series of optional live trials of an open source, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) based e-Exam system in six mid-semester undergraduate examinations during 2014 at The University of Queensland, Australia. A set of surveys were conducted prior and following each exam that covered ease of use, technical issues, comfort, confidence, time, typing versus handwriting prowess. Responses to Likert items were compared between those students who elected to type and those that handwrote their exam. Insights as to which issues proved significant for students will prove useful to institutions looking to implement computerised exams.

Variety of online tools were built to help assessing students’ performance in school. Many teachers changed their methods of assessment from paper-and-pencil (P&P) to online systems. In this study we analyse the influence that using an online system for knowledge assessment has on students’ knowledge. Based on both a literature study and our own research we designed and built an online system for knowledge assessment. The system is evaluated using two groups of primary school teachers and students (N = 686) in Slovenia: an experimental and a control group. Students solved P&P exams on several occasions. The experimental group was allowed to access the system either at school or at home for a limited period during the presentation of a selected school topic. Students in the experimental group were able to solve tasks and compare their own achievements with those of their coevals. A comparison of the P&P school exams results achieved by both groups revealed a positive effect on subject topic comprehension for those with access to the online self-assessment system.

The need for distance education is increasing due to such reasons as keeping up with the changing social conditions, meeting the learning needs of the individuals and enabling them to be lifelong learners. In addition to many advantages distance education provides, it also has certain restrictions. One of these restrictions is the problems encountered in evaluating students' success and performance. The purpose of this study is to examine the viewpoints of lecturers regarding the evaluation process of academic success and performance of those students who are attending to online distance education program and to compare lecturers' views on assessment and evaluation practices carried out in face-to-face classroom environment with those online assessment and evaluation practices. The study was a case study and the data of the study were collected from the lecturers who lectured in a distant education program of a state university. Based on the findings of the study, the problems that lecturers have in evaluating the success and performance of the students in online distance education and possible solution suggestions for these problems are presented.

This short paper looks ahead 10 years to a possible future for high stakes assessment in Australian higher education. The authors discuss some of the drivers pushing towards this future along with desirable operational features and pedagogical capabilities of an e-exam system for the year 2025. This paper represents a vision or road map to which a newly established, half million-dollar, Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching national project on e-exams will be contributing over the next three years.

This paper reports on what students think of using their own mobile devices, such as laptops, for examinations. e-Exams are an attempt to bring the pedagogical power of mobile laptop devices into the world of pen-on-paper high stakes exams. Trials of an open source, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) based e-Exam system were undertaken in six undergraduate courses during 2014 at The University of Queensland, Australia. Student voices were sought via surveys conducted prior, during and following a series of mid-semester e-exam trials. Opinions ranged from the enthusiastically positive 'I want it yesterday' to the negative 'not in my life time'. Impressions and concerns highlighted by this important stakeholder group included; typing proficiency, comfort with familiar keyboards, hand cramps from long writing durations, editing ability, reliability of technology, security, equity, cheating, familiar habits and apathy. Insights will prove useful to institutions looking to implement computerised exams using BYOD.

Proceedings of the International Mobile Learning Festival 2015:
Mobile Learning, MOOCs and 21st Century learning, May 22-23, 2014, Hong Kong SAR China

This poster presents the latest version of the open source e-Exam System version 5 developed as part of an Australian federal government Office for Learning and Teaching grant. This is an advance over that of the previous version 4 in that it adds the ability to run off-line computer marked question types. The approach used is to allow the use of the candidates own laptop computer in the supervised exam setting by bypassing the file system on the student's hard disk drive and instead providing a full operating system, office application suite, LMS and 3rd party software tools onboard a bootable USB stick. The e-Exam System is designed to maximise the affordances of ICTs for assessment in the exam room but to do so in a way that is secure, scalable and ethical. The latest version also sees a refined user interface that leads exam candidates through to their exam paper while also providing the full benefits of a 'whole of computer' software environment that can be configured by academics according to discipline needs. The ethical leveraging of exam candidates own laptops in a way provides a secured environment against cheating or collusion means that significant barriers achieving exam integrity and scalability in the adoption of large scale computerised examinations in higher education institutions can be overcome. Large scale trials across 6 courses at the University of Queensland are underway in semester 1 2014 and will be reported upon in the poster.

We define computer-mediated psychotherapy (CMP) as a computer application that: (a) is explicitly created to serve a psychotherapeutic purpose; (b) implements the principles and methods of bona fide psychotherapy; and (c) involves the patient into a range of psychotherapeutic activities. Relying on an extensive review of the literature, we found, from a developer perspective, clear reasons of optimism: the efficacy of CMP is comparable with that of traditional face-to-face therapies; its benefits exclude the costs and the demand is high. Hybridized forms show superiority over pure computerized therapies. CMP has the potentialities to produce substantial improvement of mental-health care system by: a) switching the focus of psychotherapy from symptom alleviation to enhancement of help seeking behavior; b) focusing on client as the agent of therapeutic change; and c) capitalizing on theoretical and methodological achievements from e-learning.

This paper explores the preconceptions of students as reported via a voluntary online pre- implementation survey administered in late 2013 on the topic of e-exams. The survey was conducted as part of a wider research program into the development and implementation of on- campus computerised examinations using BYOD. The survey at an Australian university received just over 480 responses from undergraduate students across a wide range of discipline areas including Arts, Commerce, Engineering, Humanities and Science. Twenty-four Likert scale items on e-exams covered pedagogical suitability, fairness, security, cheating, technical reliability, keyboard proficiency, physical comfort, equipment provision and preferences for pen-on-paper or computer based testing. Two open comments on concerns and opinions were included. Data was analysed using Man-Whitney’s U Test across programs (discipline groups), gender and by level of experience of computerised exams. The survey was conducted with the intention of uncovering pre-conceived ideas held on the part of students with regard to the idea of e-exams ahead of a planned series of e-exam trials. A range of concerns were expressed by students both for and against the idea of exams that provide the planners of e-exam approaches valuable insights into the attitudes of one of the most significant stakeholder groups. Find out more at http:/transformingexams.com

This study sought to determine the efficiency of Computerized Nutritional Status Template (CONSTATE) in the assessing the health status of the students. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH The investigation utilized the simple experimental design. It uses three methods in computing the age, BMI and health classification of the students namely: Manual, Semi-manual and the computer-based.

The authors have previously researched and analyzed, both manually and with the help of a computer program, preschool and primary school children's performance in the eye-hand coordination test and their depth perception. The study used the standardized DTVP-2 test-a psychophysiological test, and it will report as a golden standard for evaluation of visual-motor and visual perception integration. Computer-aided test processing significantly accelerates the collection and acquisition of test results-as we know, time is now a very high resource that everyone needs to spare. We evaluated the stereo vision of 56 participants by using the TNO test and eye-hand coordination. The participants were children of preschool and primary school age. Twenty of them were from a school for children with cognitive disabilities. The TNO test results showed that 54% of children between the ages of 5.5 and 9.0 years old had 60 arcsec, 18%-120 arcsec, and 29%-240 arcsec. The DTVP-2 test execution rate shows a very strong correlation with the stereoacuity (r = 0, 90; p < 0, 05). A computerized DTVP-2 test performance coefficient shows a higher correlation with stereo (r =0, 99; p < 0, 05). The DTVP-2 performance coefficient related to stereovision value-the higher the eye-hand coordination performance coefficient, the lower are the stereo threshold value. The conclusions of master thesis research became hypotheses of PhD research and started developing a ViMoT methodology. The development of a new methodology (ViMoT) for assessing visual-motor coordination and visual perception in electronic format and the subsequent development of a computer program will facilitate many specialists' work. It will make it possible to devote more time to processing, but correction or help of an individual (patient), depending on his problem. By working in an interdisciplinary manner, there is an in-depth knowledge of the topic, researched, and new solutions relevant to e-learning. Ensures the quality of the research and increases competitiveness. The following primary research methods will be applied to achieve the aim of the study: theoretical data research as descriptive analysis, content analysis, and comparative method; mixed type of methods as both qualitative research methods and quantitative research methods-document use, case studies, surveys, focus groups discussions and interviews with target groups, experimental and practical testing of recommendations; analysis methods as descriptive analysis, statistical analysis, and others. Today's users and learners require a user-oriented and personalized approach, not only in applications but also in education. The primary study aims to develop components for improving e-learning and learning process Visual-Motor Test (ViMoT) methodologies based and a new computerized tool on visual science basic principles, psychophysiological, and learners' needs.

Usually, the assessment of large organizations with several levels of hierarchy is part of the management field and done
by Management Information Systems (MIS). The information produced by these systems are turnover, net sales, gross
sales, stock list, inventory, payroll and staff listings (Laudon & Laudon, 2000; Laudon, Laudon & Brabston, 2011).
However, assessment of teams with several levels of hierarchy can also occur in the education field. Some examples are
the production of the class newspaper, the teaching of group counseling, assessment of teaching internships and also all
productions and performances made by teams. In the case of the class newspaper where students can be appointed to the
hierarchical positions of journalist, chief of chronicle and editor-in-chief, the journalist can be identified as a team
member, the chief of a chronicle a team leader and the editor-in-chief as the team administrator or the team manger that
supervises team leaders. A large amount of research have been done on Management Information System (MIS) but in
opposition, almost no research have been done in education on the assessment of teams of students having several levels
of hierarchy except for the assessment system developed by Nance (2000, p. 198). The only research done concerns
teams with only one level of hierarchy where team members assess their team leader or the team leader assess his team
members with assessment grids as in the SPARK (Freeman & McKenzie, 2000, 2002; Willey & Freeman, 2006), OTAS
(Undre, Sevdalis, Healey, Darzi & Vincent, 2007), Mega Code (Kaye & Mancini, 1986) and MLE (Marshall-Mies,
Fleishman, Martin, Zaccaro, Baughman & McGee, 2000) applications. An Internet assessment application named «
Cluster » (Lesage, Raîche, Riopel, Fortin & Sebkhi, 2015) that assess teams with several levels of hierarchy in the field
of education has been developed for a Ph.D. project. This application is very similar to a Management Information
System (MIS) because both applications are able to assess organizations with several level of hierarchy. The only
difference is that the educational applications produces marks and assessment data instead of management data. The
actual research is able to prove that adding educational assessment capabilities to any Management Information Systems
(MIS) can suit this application to be used in the field of education. The last statement defining a link between the fields of
education and management. The process of grouping the students in teams with a hierarchical tree structure by giving
them hierarchical positions, to present the team an assessment task and after dismantling the teams to reform the students
with different hierarchical positions to present them another assessment task is called the hierarchical aggregate
assessment process (Lesage, Raîche, Riopel, Fortin & Sebkhi, 2015).

The study tried to develop an Arabic computerized test for Mechanical Ability test, and to assess its reliability and validity, as well as testee’s acceptance of this new form.  As well as measuring the relationship between the attitude toward computer,  experience with computer, and test performance.  The sample consists of 244 male and female Kuwait University undergraduates.  Through the developed version, it  was feasible to register subject’s biodata, and to present test’s instructions, items, and answers. It was possible to register testee’s answer to each item, the time taken to answer both each item and the whole test.  Good reliability and validity were obtained for this form. Most subjects accepted the new form. Males got significantly higher mean scores on the Mechanical Ability Test than females. However, no significant sex difference was found on attitude toward computer.

BACKGROUND The Patient Health Questionnaire-4 (PHQ-4) is an ultra-brief self-report consisting of a 2-item depression scale (PHQ-2) and a 2-item anxiety scale (GAD-2). The aim of the present study is to determine the psychometric properties of a computerized version of the PHQ-4 used to detect emotional disorders (anxiety and depression) in the primary care setting. METHOD A total of 1052 patients with suspected anxiety, depression, or somatic symptoms were recruited from 28 primary care centres participating in the PsicAP trial and completed the full version of the computerized PHQ. In addition, 178 of these patients also underwent in clinical interviews as a gold standard. RESULTS Confirmatory factor analyses showed very good fit indices for a two-factor solution. This model was structurally invariant among the various age and gender groups and internal consistency was acceptable (PHQ-4; $\alpha$=0.83, PHQ-2; $\alpha$=0.86, and GAD-2; $\alpha$=0.76). The best cut-off points to obt...

For educators, creating and administering effective evaluation tools can be arduous. Tests and quizzes, the traditional approach, must be challenging enough to assess the student’s mastery of course material, yet not so difficult as to frustrate and dishearten. Additionally, instructors must account for the inevitable range of student aptitude in each class. Part of evaluation involves rewarding prepared students with high scores and penalizing neglectful students with low scores. Hence, there is a delicate balance. If an exam is too easy, all students receive high scores and there is no incentive for good students to prepare. Too difficult, even average students will fail. Evaluating student performance is a complex undertaking, as aptitude is not the only consideration. Factors such as stress can lead to poor scores. Students are often intimidated when asked to compose answers to exam questions. This is especially true for exams requiring detailed technical answers. Low confidence...

We define computer-mediated psychotherapy (CMP) as a computer application that: (a) is explicitly created to serve a psychotherapeutic purpose; (b) implements the principles and methods of bona fide psychotherapy; and (c) involves the patient into a range of psychotherapeutic activities. Relying on an extensive review of the literature, we found, from a developer perspective, clear reasons of optimism: the efficacy of CMP is comparable with that of traditional face-to-face therapies; its benefits exclude the costs and the demand is high. Hybridized forms show superiority over pure computerized therapies. CMP has the potentialities to produce substantial improvement of mental-health care system by: a) switching the focus of psychotherapy from symptom alleviation to enhancement of help seeking behavior; b) focusing on client as the agent of therapeutic change; and c) capitalizing on theoretical and methodological achievements from e-learning.

Reading comprehension in adults is a rather neglected variable in the practice of psychological assessment. We propose a new screening instrument for adult reading comprehension based on a pragmatic definition of reading comprehension as the textual understanding of the text read. Using data from a calibration sample (n = 266) and a replication sample (n = 148) for cross validation, we tested the model fit for the 1-PL model (Rasch model; graphic model test, Anderson’s Condi-tional Likelihood Ratio test). Model fit was established and verified in the replication sample after the stepwise exclusion of three (out of 16) items. Correlations with a test for memory and the exter-nal criterion reading proficiency were in the expected direction. The comparison of a sub-group of putatively highly skilled readers (n = 59; University students and lecturers) and putatively low skilled readers (n = 122; participants undergoing psychological assessment for having their driving license reinstated after a ban) showed that a percent rank < 10 in the measure might indicate insuf-ficient reading skills for practical purposes. Pending further research, the instrument seems to be a useful instrument for the screening of reading comprehension skills in adults.