(1214) COMPUTER-BASED TOOLS FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING PROCESSES IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

摘要

Assessment of learning processes is an essential part of the educational practice. On the one hand, itallows evaluating the knowledge, skills and attitudes achieved by the students;;on the other hand,results can be used to make decisions for the improvement of the educational practices.The success of e-learning has allowed the emergence of new computer-based tools designed toenhance each stage of the educational process. Information technologies applied to education andparticularly the use of Internet allow the creation of interactive self-assessment tests that can be usefultools to motivate students in learning tasks and to check their progress previously to be definitelyexamined. Computer-based assessment (CBA) offers the following advantages against traditionalpaper-based exams: grades and feedback can be immediately provided to the student;;greaterflexibility in the location and the time to carry out the exam is allowed;;interactive activities andmultimedia tools can be incorporated to the assessment process;;teacher's interpretations andlegibility problems are avoided;;and time and cost effectiveness, among others. Disadvantagesinclude: authoring and security possible failures, additional work for teacher to generate tests, possibletechnical failures and difficulties to carry out and automatically mark certain types of exams (e.g.essay questions or engineering problems, etc.).The paper discusses the technical features required by computer-based assessment software to beused in higher education courses. A comparative analysis of different applications to conduct on-lineand off-line exams has been carried out, with particular attention to the available types of questions,the possibility of incorporating multimedia content to the exams, the possibility of creating andmanaging a bank of questions, available test generation options (i.e. maximum number of questions,time control, number of attempts,…), scoring options or the ability to provide feedback to the studentson their answers, among some other questions.