Using assignments as an assessment method helps students demonstrate the integration and application of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, and also provides teachers evidence of the student's learning and achievement of learning goals. To evaluate the output products, teachers can use various methods depending on the focus of the assignments, for instance teachers can use sensory perceptions like observing, reading or touching to evaluate student's outputs, from the quality of produced products to group/individual's performance or skills. To use assignment for assessment purposes, teachers must make sure that the given assignments are aligned with the learning outcomes and teaching activities. Defining criteria and rubrics can help students see what is valued, what key aspects of performance they are expected to master, and to what level or standard of that particular performance/product.
Assessment is the critical aspect in teaching and learning. It's one of the most powerful forms of accountability held by education providers. Assessment offers useful feedback to both teacher and students about to which level students' performance is successfully meeting up with the course learning objectives. It provides the evidence to validate and document that learning and achievement do actually happen in the class, and reflect the development of rationale for teaching practices.
There are generally two forms of assessments; formative and summative assessment. The first one is regarded as a tool to evaluate student learning over the course time. Its purpose aims at better students' performance and giving action-oriented feedback during the learning process, so that students have an opportunity to change behavior and re-learn. It helps the learners to understand their strengths and weaknesses, and how they can improve themselves to meet the desired outcomes. The teachers are also provided an opportunity to early detect students' struggling and identify the areas needed for both teaching and learning development. The second form involves the evaluation of students at the end of the study course. The strength of summative assessment lies in the critical information it provides about students' overall performance and future areas teaching and learning could be developed in order to make further improvement.
A new digital tool that allows teachers to visually and audibly monitor the students during the examination. It can be used within the classroom where students physically present, or in the scenario where students are in remote locations. Teachers are able to create and administer the online assessment within the platform through several video conferencing services such as Meet, Hangouts, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. When used together, Exam.net monitors what students do on the device, while the video solution monitors what happens at the student's location. The site comes with built-in support tools such as GeoGebra and Desmos, programming/coding spell-check, drawing area, diagrams or graphs embedding function, chemistry formulas and tables add-on, calculator, and other tools that support writing mathematical expressions. In addition to math/science-oriented tools, you can also find tools such as built-in dictionaries in different languages, audio files, speech synthesis, translation, and Turnitin. During the exam the student's device is locked to the exam environment which means the student is prevented from copy/pasting text and the teacher can monitor student's activity log, trace back how a text has evolved, and analyze the text to check for plagiarism. After the exam, teachers can choose to either print, download as PDF or Word file, or export the student's work to Google Drive or OneDrive. The functions to mark, grade, and provide feedback are not, however, included within the platform. Another plus point of Exam.net, besides providing a secure exam environment, is the fact that it is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant, and has taken highly security measures, for example, encrypted communication, sign-in log and protection against malware, to protect the data of users. The teachers can also choose the level of security when creating an exam, which could restrict students' browser options and make it impossible for them to access other programs or tools on their devices during the examination.
Testimate is a full-fledged platform developed to support a remote exam. Its features cover three areas: exam creation, proctoring, and scoring report. Its exam features support various types of questions-making, simple to complex. The teachers are provided with options to use questions of single choice, multiple choice, multiple choice reason, matrix table, complex multiple choice, short answer, subjective, etc. This platform supports a number of smart devices, either Android or IOS. Its proctor feature offers flexibility as much as its exam-making functions. Testimate provides facility to capture pictures of remote exam takers using student's live webcam feed, which helps to identify if a student is appearing for the exam without any external help. It also identifies the exam takers' location (longitude, latitude), and IP address, to inform the proctor where they actually are. The system is working as a tracking tool for each individual, and displays their status in real-time on the proctoring dashboard. All progress data is shown in infographic/table/picture format. In addition, the scoring system is working immediately after each question has been answered. The system also comes with a prevent-cheating function which allows the proctor to check a student's activity log, get an instant alert and flag when they do something that is not allowed in the exam i.e. switch screen to YouTube or other prohibited application. The system allows you to set the criteria (range of number that presents the level of achievement students had performed) to be used for report results. Scoring can be done automatically or manually. The answers can be exported individually or in a big chunk, together with attached files and timestamps. When analyzing the exam, the system creates two reports; audit trail and custom report. First report uses data collection from demographic and personal behavior, while the later collects data from individual and subject results to generate an analysis.
