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© 2002 FSCreations, Inc. |
As the Head of a Mathematics Department in a school where all students have computers and the use of technology is an integral part of the curriculum, it is important to constantly update the applications available. Over the past few years we have introduced interactive computer-based activities throughout all year levels (7-12). These activities now complement the traditional methods of teaching and learning that take place every day within the school. As an adjunct to the classroom education, there is an established homework program. The overall focus of the homework program is to provide opportunities for students to regularly revise past methods and skills so that their recall of past work is at a premium. It is within this program that we make extensive use of ExamView and its capabilities. ExamView allows us to:
The majority of tasks we develop consist of twenty multiple choice questions. ExamView creates the questions with ease due to the fully-featured inbuilt equation editor.
To a mathematical-based department like ours, this feature is a must. The created questions are saved into question banks which are categorized by topic and year level. Access to these question banks is available to all members of the Mathematics Department and therefore the variety and number of questions increases very rapidly in a short amount of time. Up until now we have created the questions without giving real feedback to the students, particularly when wrong answers were chosen. In our future tasks we will make use of the 'notes' and 'rationale' fields when constructing the questions so that students get more information about their incorrect responses. Also, for senior classes we will shorten the tasks to ten questions as students have found the twenty questions too long for one sitting. In making the tasks available and to ensure students have access at any time, we use the test-hosting service offered by ExamView. Tasks are published directly to the ExamView website and students are made aware of the website address. We use one account for the entire department and group students by class. One department account allows us to publish one task for an entire year level which is perfect for our homework program. The other benefit of the test-hosting service is the statistical analysis available on each task. As well as providing information on individual student results, it can give a breakdown of the responses for each question and indicate which ones were answered poorly. This allows us to go back and revise certain concepts and algorithms immediately so that misconceptions are not left unchecked. As the screen shot below shows, there are a few questions on this task that were answered poorly and therefore some form of follow up would be carried out.
The ExamView program has allowed us to expand our repertoire of technology-based applications. Over the coming months we will begin to further explore the capabilities of ExamView and implement those features we see as being helpful to the overall education of the students we teach. Kevin
McMenamin
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