An ICT-Based Technique for Assessment of Short-Answer Question

Student-centred education philosophy emphasized feedback to students during the process of learning. However, there is always the complaints from the students that the feedback on their work is not effective and most often than not they could not benefit from such feedback. There is always a time delay between a submitted work from and the returned work with feedback to the students. A time delay of one week is common, but it can be as long as one month; the situation is worse when the class size is big, say 200 students. This paper reports on an experimental technique by the author to address this issue so that feedback to student work could be done as immediately as possible. This technique employed some established technologies that are commonly used in the world of electronic communication and the power of computer, in terms of speed. This technique was tried by using short-answer questions that is normally practiced when trying to assess the progress, or the level of understanding on the learned subject content, of the students. The positive result obtained in this work proved that it is possible through the use of ICT for the teacher to provide immediate feedback to the students on the answers they submitted online although they were some cases that still need the attention of the teacher and hence a short delay in time. Further, the author believed that the success of this technique will aid the adoption of formative or action assessment in engineering education.