Development of an Online-System for Assessing the Progress of Knowledge Acquisition in Psychology Students

摘要

Results of summative examinations represent most often only a snapshot of the knowledge of students over a part of the curriculum and do not provide valid information on whether a long-term retention of knowledge and knowledge growth takes place during the course of studies. Progress testing allows the repeated formative assessment of students' functional knowledge and consists of questions covering all domains of relevant knowledge from a given curriculum. This article describes the development and structure of an online platform for progress testing in psychology at the Witten/Herdecke University. The Progress Test Psychology (PTP) was developed in 2015 in the Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy at Witten/Herdecke University and consists of 100 confidence-weighted true-/false-items (sure / unsure / don't know). The Online-System for implementation of the PTP was developed based on XAMPP including an Apache Server, a MySQL-Database, PHP and JavaScript. First results of a longitudinal survey show the increase in student's knowledge in the course of studies also reliably reflects the course of the curriculum. Thus, content validity of the PTP could be confirmed. Apart from directly measuring the long-term retention of knowledge the use of the PTP in the admission of students applying for a Master's program is discussed.