Great idea! I’ve been pushing my librarians to do quick/easy little assessments like this for a couple of semesters now but in paper format. Doing it electronically has posed the same probs you mention here. I’d never thought of using a timestamp…that’s brilliant! I wish my institution had “instructional id #’s” with which to track pre/post assessments while maintaining anonymity. We use their network UN’s for everything here, which would only provide confidentiality in an assessment situation like this. Regardless, I may tackle a similar project now by stealing your timestamp idea.

Thanks!

Dan

The hope is to eventually develop a test bank of questions and create a series of tests. However, we *do* hope that students learn the content enough that they’ll be able to answer the test questions correctly without memorizing the questions’ answers.

Additionally, since they aren’t provided the correct answers, they never know if they’ve chosen the “right” one–since we’re not grading them but using them for assessment, there is no “right” one. If we delivered the information properly, they should know the answer, but if we did not, they won’t. If they choose incorrectly, it reflects poorly on us, not them.

Cliff

Wonderful use of technology and keen idea to capture individualized results without becoming a “friend to Big Brother.” My question is about the sample of questions. Are you planning to use a rotating base of questions that ask similar things or cover key areas? If not, how are you accounting for the skew from students possible memorizing the questions? Or is that not a concern being that the tests are administered with a semester in between?

Great work.

John