Assessment Issues
Online Assessment is a wide area and we have chosen to concentrate on some specific topics. Over the next few months (November and December 2002) we shall be adding short briefings on each of these topics. Click on the links (when they appear) to visit these resources. All these materials should also be accessible directly from the SCROLLA web site at http://www.scrolla.ac.uk/.

• Item Analysis - more
  
Item Analysis, using methods such as Item Response Theory allows us to measure the utility of a particular question (item) and can be used to classify the difficulty and assess the effectiveness of groups of questions.
• Item Banking
  Through careful classification and description, banks of questions can be assembled and maintained, facilitating sharing and reuse.
• Multimedia in Assessment - more
Assessment isn't just about text and graphics: by incorporating moving images, sounds and animations, a wider range of skills can be assessed.
• Simulation and Assessment
  
By linking assessments and simulations together, we can begin to assess a student's performance more directly.
• Accessibility
  Ensuring that the assessments you provide are accessible to all is an important consideration when planning online assessment (this is especially the case when multimedia elements are utilised).
• Adaptive Testing
  
Providing students with different learning materials depending on how they perform in assessments provides a powerful means of individualising the learning experience.
• Skills Testing
  
Skills Testing incorporates task based testing of competency in software applications such as MS Word, where a student's performance of a task in situ can be measured.
• Summative Assessment
  
Although online assessment is now widely used for formative assessment, there are still practical and attitudinal barriers to using it for summative assessment.
• Automated Marking
  
Whilst it is easy to mark objective type questions automatically, it is much harder to mark free response items.

Feel free to suggest other areas of online assessment which you think we should focus on.