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Educator's Voice

Volume 5, Issue 7
July 13, 2004

Assessing Well: Using Publisher Test Banks as a Component of an Assessment Portfolio

One of the most time-consuming aspects of online instruction is the creation and management of testing pieces. Best practice research encourages offering practice assessment material in the form of pre- and post-exams in each topic or unit. Many instructors design a quiz on a weekly, unit or chapter basis. It is common for departments or programs to have minimum requirements for testing, usually consisting of at least a mid-term and a final exam.

The responsibility of providing such a quantity of assessments can require a huge chunk of instructor time. Often, something has to give in an instructor's schedule in order to find time to design and implement exams. This creates a danger that the instructor-student interaction in courses will suffer due to lack of an instructor!

Enter the textbook publisher. In a bid to offer robust supplementary content to online adopters of their book titles, publishers have invested a lot in assessment creation. This is a good thing for you, the instructor. What better to supplement your own assessment questions than questions created by the author of the textbook used in the course?

Publisher test banks are often large, allowing for the creation of versioned exams and exam pools that can be rotated through course iterations to help foil cheating. A large test bank also can provide material for self-assessments, meeting the student need to practice in the exam environment.

But let's go back to the word "large." The size of these test banks can be daunting! How do you get test banks with two or three hundred questions in your eCollege course? How do you manage the use of so many questions once they are there?

Adding Publisher Test Banks to your Course

eCollege has partnered with software and content providers to ease an instructor's worries regarding exam creation, portability and management. Using these tools and content can increase the time you spend with your students.

Respondus
This software is your best ally in adding large publisher test banks to the eCollege platform. Some publishers offer test banks as Respondus (.rsp) files to verified adopters of their titles. These files can be directly uploaded to your course shell from your computer's hard drive.

If you don't know if your publisher offers pre-formatted Respondus test banks for the title you use, contact your publisher sales representative. Be aware that these exam banks are the property of the publisher. Use of this material is contingent upon adherence to the publisher's rules of use.

Respondus is also a way to move tests within platforms. If you have a test bank already created in a course that currently runs in the Blackboard or WebCT platform, Respondus can bring it into the eCollege platform with no cutting and pasting required!

Obtain a free trial version of Respondus by going to www.respondus.com. This site provides a comprehensive, downloadable user's guide and some demo movies. Details on Respondus support are also available, as well as an e-mail support address.

Click here to download the Respondus User's Guide
Click here to view Respondus demo movies
Click here to view the Respondus Support Resources page

Publisher C-Packs
Many publishers offer ancillary content (C-Packs) through eCollege for their titles. C-Packs usually include assessment material. If you can't get Respondus-formatted exams for your textbook title, check with your publisher sales representative or your institution's eCollege Client Services Representative to arrange for C-Pack material to be added to your course. Please be aware that C-Pack material is the property of the publisher. Use of this material is contingent upon adherence to the publisher's rules of use.

Managing Large Test banks in your Course

If test creation is a time-consuming enterprise, test management is another potential time-sink. Formal assessments often find their way from former to future students, making it necessary to create and hold different versions of an exam in order to administer a brand new, original exam to a later group of students. The eCollege Exam Manager and Test bank features can help you create exams that will always be fresh and different from those of previous terms.

Once your publisher test bank is loaded in your course, you have a couple of different options for creating custom exams. Both of these options will require set-up time, but once you complete the pooling or versioning, your future workload with regard to exam creation and management will be lightened. This is a timesaver for you, and more of your time is good for your students!

Pooling
On the chapter or unit level, you can create pools within a test bank and designate how many questions from each pool should display in the exam. If there are questions that you feel are necessary for every student to answer, you may designate them as mandatory within the pool. The other questions will appear randomly (in both question selection and question order) to the student based on designated settings in the pool.

Say you have a pool of 25 questions chosen to assess student's mastery of a topic within your current chapter. You can weight this topic in the exam through the number of questions you designate to the exam from this topic pool or by making the questions in the pool of a high point value. You decide that you'd like 15 questions from the topic pool to be displayed in your exam, but there are five questions, which are really central and you want to be sure each student has the opportunity to encounter them. You would designate the five questions as mandatory within the pool, and tell the pool itself to display 15 questions. The end result is that the student answers 15 of the 25 questions in the topic pool, five of which are present in all student exams. The 10 others will display randomly and differently to each student.

Versioning
eCollege's Test bank feature eases the creation of cumulative exams by helping you copy questions from individual exams such as the chapter or unit level exams discussed above. For example, the five mandatory questions from each pool can be copied to your mid-term or final exam content item.

You may wish to create a completely different mid-term or final exam in each of three or four terms with the intention of rotating these exams through subsequent terms. This practice aids in preventing an exam from being passed from students in one term to students of the next. Using the Test bank feature, you can create your newly versioned exams, one in each term for a number of terms. Be sure to hide (Content Items can be hidden in the system) the exams from student view that you won't be using in your current term.

The Assessment Portfolio

Whether or not you use a publisher test bank to augment your current exam material, it is always a good idea not to lean too hard on formal assessments to evaluate the learning a student has achieved in your course. The portfolio approach to assessment allows students of each learning style to demonstrate newly acquired abilities, knowledge and hard work!

Not every student shines in an atmosphere of formal testing. Adult learners know that performance in the real world doesn't correlate with clicking the right radio button on an exam screen. It is therefore a good idea and an instructionally sound practice to use other methods of assessment such as threaded discussion, group work, Internet research, or a research paper to augment the objective results of formal testing. We hope that using available publisher test banks in conjunction with a portfolio assessment strategy will get you out of a cycle of constant test development and into better student development!

       --Vicki Galloway Harsh, M.A.

TIP

Image Resizing: Quick Alternatives

If you have a PC with Windows XP, there are a couple of relatively easy ways to resize images.

Method No. 1: Use the Paint program. Just go to Start/Programs/Accessories/Paint. Once the Paint program is open, go to File/Open and find the image you wish to alter. Double click on it, or select it and click Open to insert into Paint. When you see the image in Paint, go to the Image menu and choose Stretch/Skew from the dropdown box. When the Stretch/Skew box comes up, just edit the Horizontal and Vertical percentages to reduce or increase the image's width and height. Of course, remember to "Save As" with a similar but slightly different title (e.g., image2) so as to keep both the original and the altered copy.

Method No. 2: You can download a nifty little piece of software from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp. Look on this "Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP" page for the download links on your right, then download and install the "Image Resizer." It won't take very long at all. Once installation is complete, you will find that when you right click on any image icon, you will have an option to Resize Pictures even without opening the image. It's very intuitive and easy.

       -- Edward H. Ladon, Ph.D.