Addressing efficiency and quality of marking in essay assessment with e-learning support
Main Article Content
Abstract
The value of formative assessment using essays is clearly defined in the educational literature. Essays focus on the highest-level learning outcomes of analysing, evaluating, and creating. Formative assessment provides students with feedback to guide their learning. Current e-learning systems largely focus on summative assessment and give only very limited support for the management and marking of essay assignments. After outlining the educational theories on essay assignments, this article introduces two novel e-learning applications, WebCTConnect and MarkTool. Functional descriptions of these applications and their grounding in assessment theory are given. It is argued that e-learning tools can increase the efficiency in dealing with essay assignments and that the quality of essay assessment can be improved by incorporating scoring rubrics, offering class-wide analysis of feedback, and providing tools for the cooperation of marking teams.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
a. This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Readers are permitted to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of the articles in this journal.
and
b. Acknowledgement should be made of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal using a full citation. In addition, a link to the JOFDL site at https://www.jofdl.nz is recommended where appropriate.