Digital assessments
Tests and assessments give you a better idea of how well students are doing. Keep reading to find out which ICT resources are available for the various assessment methods.
Testing and assessment methods
There are broadly three approaches to assessment or testing.
- Formative: students do exercises, and you give them feedback
- Summative: you grade students’ performance
- Diagnostic: you check whether students are able to structure their own learning process, or you encourage independent learning
Formative digital testing involves practising using the study material. Lecturers often use multiple-choice tests for this, providing feedback for each answer option.
The study material often consists of audio and video clips in addition to text. You can take the scores obtained by your students into account when calculating their final grade or use them as a requirement for completing a course.
Looking for tools to help you with formative assessments? Check out the following pages on the Brightspace support page:
Faculties are currently experimenting with specialist assessment software. For more information, contact your faculty’s ICT and Education coordinator.
The University is reviewing ways to use summative digital assessments. An alternative is to use the print & scan approach: you print out a test for your students from a digital question database; they complete the test on paper, and you then scan their answer sheets; the system then marks the answer sheets automatically.
For more information, contact your faculty’s ICT and Education coordinator.
Online marking allows you to grade students’ papers quickly and effectively. You can mark by giving a grade, but you can also use labels and highlight elements. You then ‘attach’ these to a passage and add typed or spoken comments.
Rubrics
You can also use a ‘rubric’, an assessment matrix for assessing a student in a more nuanced way on, for example, argumentation, style, language and bibliography. If you are looking for a tool to use for online marking, try GradeMark, which is available in Brightspace as Turnitin Assignment.
Check out the following pages on the Brightspace support page:
For more information, contact your faculty’s ICT and Education coordinator.
Peer review is an assessment method where students assess each other’s work. Sometimes they use criteria provided by the lecturer for this, which often means that the final version of a piece of work is of a higher standard. For more information about peer review, see under Collaborative learning.
When assessing your students’ work, you are also required to check for plagiarism. Plagiarism is a violation of another person’s intellectual property. The University considers plagiarism a serious offence and has therefore drawn up a series of guidelines.
The University uses Turnitin, (available on Brightspace) to check students’ work for plagiarism.
For more information, contact your faculty’s ICT and Education coordinator.
The in-house experts of the Leiden Learning & Innovation Centre (LLInc) know how to test, create good test questions, work with test matrices and interpret statistical data after a test. They also offer instructions on all of the above. For more information, see workshops and training programmes. Additionally, LLInC offers an automated exam grading service and support with interpretation of exam results statistics.
If you are in need of other support in preparing your tests and courses, please go to Help and support.