A presentation from the STEM Annual Conference 2014.
We describe the results of implementing a retrospective review of students’ performance on a summative e-Assessment taken by level I Engineering students at the University of the West of England. The e-Assessment content was on the topic of external reactions on structures. This assessment contained six questions each one requiring a free-form numerical entry from the student. DEWIS was used to run the e-Assessment and because it is a loss-less data system all the data relating to every assessment attempt is recorded. The system has been designed so that this data is easily accessible and facilitates retrospective marking. Using the extensive reporter feature a detailed analysis of every assessment run was performed. The advantage to this retrospective approach is that common student errors (CSEs) do not have to be pre-determined (prior to running the e-Assessment) but can be searched for at a later date. We shall demonstrate the process of spotting a potential CSE setting performance flags to identify such a CSE and re-marking the whole cohort to analyse how many of the students triggered this errors. By amending the question extra bespoke feedback can be provided. Not only will this enhanced feedback benefit future students but it will also benefit current students since using the loss-less data feature the updated feedback can easily be applied retrospectively to pass assessments.
