Engineering a Testbank of Engineering Questions

1 Su White, University of Southampton, Intelligence Agents and Multimedia, ECS Zepler Building, Southampton, SO17 1BJ [email protected] 2 Kate Dickens, University of Southampton, Intelligence Agents and Multimedia, ECS Zepler Building, Southampton, SO17 1BJ [email protected] 3 Hugh Davis, University of Southampton, Intelligence Agents and Multimedia, ECS Zepler Building, Southampton, SO17 1BJ [email protected] e3an is funded under the joint Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and Department for Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland (DEL) initiative the Fund for Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL), reference53/99 Abstract  e3an is a collaborative UK project developing a network of expertise in assessment issues within electrical and electronic engineering. A major focus is the development of a testbank of peer-reviewed questions for diagnostic, formative and summative assessment. The resulting testbank will contain thousands of well-constructed and tested questions and answers. Question types include objective, numeric, short answer and examination. Initially a set of metadata descriptors were specified classifying information such as subject, level and type of cognitive skills being assessed. Academic consultants agreed key curriculum areas (themes), identified important learning outcomes and produced sets of exemplar questions and answers. Questions were authored in a word processor then converted to the database format. Major pedagogical, organisational and technical issues were encountered, including specification of appropriate interoperable data formats, the standards for data entry and the design of an intuitive interface to enable effective use.