A very full description of Perception can be found at Question Mark’s Web site; reviews by Dempster (1998) Strickland (1999) Paterson (2001) may also be seen on the Web and a good set of “driving instructions” has been produced by the Learning Technology Development Unit (LTDU) at the University of Hertfordshire.
This report therefore focuses on various extensions that we have made at Brunel to enhance the functionality of Perception for testing of mathematics and statistics. A long-term aim is to replace and enhance the Mathletics suite of online objective tests see Greenhow (2002). Whilst Mathletics was (and still is) a very successful workhorse it was written in QM Designer meaning that questions are hard-wired in a Windows-based proprietary format. Perception offers a much more future-proofed and interoperable authoring system (written within QTI IMS specifications see Sclater and Low (2002) that can deliver questions via Windows or the Web possibly linked to a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) such as Blackboard or WebCT. This means that answer files from a Perception-authored test can also be managed by the VLE (so that a lecturer could assess by using a standard set of Perception tests without using Perception itself).
