Thoughts-on-assessments

12/1 - thinking about how to study for assessments
Many students don't seem to know how to study for assessments. With mathXLforschool, i think the strategy for studying might be reviewing and redoing homework assignments and redoing quizzes until their score is 100%. One thing to do when training students to prepare for tests in this new way is to announce and emphasize that they need to redo their quizzes after school.

__**Are online assessments as effective as paper assessments?**__
Does the method of administering an assessment affect the outcome? This is often called __test mode effect__ and tends to focus on two areas, the absolute effect and the differential effect.

The absolute effect compares the administration of the same questions in a paper based and online based format, and compares the success of students using each format.

The differential effect compares the effect of test mode on individual learners. Even if a paper based test has identical outcomes to an online test for a group of students, there may be differences within the group, with some students benefiting from one mode or another. Analyzing which students benefit most from which type of test mode is the focus of this kind of research.

[|Here's] a short academic paper that shed's light on the topic. Basically, they found that, for identical questions, groups given the online assessment outperformed groups given the paper based assessment.

Another important set of factors explored were content familiarity, computer familiarity, competitiveness and gender. These were found to NOT be related to the difference in group performance between online and paper based groups.

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