Stout Party
An elegant clue from my usual source:
Beer with creamy head such as Guinness (4 letters)
appeared first in The Guardian but I don’t know the author.
An elegant clue from my usual source:
Beer with creamy head such as Guinness (4 letters)
appeared first in The Guardian but I don’t know the author.
A nice ‘clue of the week’ in The Week, taken from a puzzle by Virgilius in The Independent:
As good as John, Paul or George but not Ringo? (7, last letter y)
Writers about assessment make the distinction between formative and summative modes (see Definitions below). It is too often seen as a black-and-white dichotomy. As part of a plea for shades of grey, let me suggest suggest the watched or moderated mode of assessment.
In watched mode, students are allowed a limited or unlimited number of attempts at a given test (or at several variations of it). All their activity is recorded, and they know that their teacher or assessor has access to their results and that the information may be used to form an interim judgement about their commitment, to discuss their progress, and to provide feedback, even though their marks do not influence their progression or their degree.
Other “shades of grey” please.
Definitions of Formative/Summative Assessment
There are many descriptions of these concepts. Here are two I feel happy with in the context of a degree course:Warwick’s Elab has published the first draft of Quizbuilder, its elegant tool for writing simple online tests with the minimum of fuss. You might like to try your hand at this short test of 11 multiple-choice questions on elementary number theory, which took me less than an hour to write. The LaTeX equations are a little wobbly in their baselines, but perfectly fit for purpose.
As part of its nearly-£5m investment in Moodle, the free open-source course management system (CMS, aka VLE), the Open University (OU) is currently adding its in-house assessment software OpenMark to Moodle’s assessment capabilities. It will also incorporate some of the authoring strengths of OpenMark into the Moodle Quiz. The full integration may take some time to complete but will mean that OpenMark becomes open source too.
OpenMark’s strengths include the ability to diplay complicated mathematical and symbolic expressions and to provide graduated targeted feedback in response to multiple attempts at variations of the same question. Given the OU’s high production standards and long term funding, this development can only bode well for the future of online assessment, in particular, the assessment of mathematics-based subjects.
Follow-up to Fit for Purpose? from Computer-aided assessment for sciences
Three kinds of data need to be kept safe: (i) the questions stored for a test; (ii) student answers entered during a test; (ii) submitted answers and results.
Follow-up to Informal Workshop at Warwick on 26th March on CAA with Maths from Computer-aided assessment for sciences
For 5 hours on Monday, a score of us shared thoughts about online assessment, especially the assessment of mathematics. Here are some of my headline takes on the day:
There are plans to produce a proper report of the day. Watch this space.
Follow-up to MADCAP from Computer-aided assessment for sciences
Venue: The Mathematics Institute in the Zeeman Building (find us)
Outline Programme
10.30 onwards: Coffee in Maths Common Room
11-00 till 1-00: Short presentations and long discussions in B3.02
1-00 till 1-45: Lunch in the Maths Common Room
1-45 till 3-00: Short presentations and long discussions in B3.02
3-00 till 3-30: Summing up and future plans.
3-30 onwards: Tea in the Maths Common Room
As a cockney I enjoyed this “clue of the week” in a recent copy of The Week:
On Bill Foster’s initative, we are plannng a small informal workshop at Warwick on Monday, 26th March to discuss priorities for computer-aided assessment (CAA) in Higher Education (HE). Bill accepts responsibility for the acronym MADCAP, short for “Mathematics and Computer-Aided Practice Group”. He has had considerable experience using the i-Assess package for large-scale mathematics assessment at the University of Newcastle. We will be joined by colleagues exploring other approaches at Birmingham, Brunel, Portsmouth, Surrey, The Open University, and Warwick.
Here are some topics we hope to talk about:
1. Assessing symbolic material (in particular mathematics) online. Which tools handle this well? How effectively can their functionality be bent to serve our pedagogic needs? Here are some aspects:
2. How can HE institutions influence and gain some control over the development of assessment tools? Are there models of development beyond “buying out of the box”?
Follow-up workshops are planned at Heriot-Watt and the Open University based upon the outcomes of this meeting.