ABSTRACT
The monitoring of a student’s progress in acquiring knowledge and skill in knowledge-rich domains such as composition, biology, geography, or history is typically accomplished by such procedures as weekly quizzes, laboratory exercises, written papers, and midterm examinations. Such activities normally employ written materials and require that a student solve problems and compose written text. They usually are prepared by a teacher and are used to motivate students’ learning by providing them with situations requiring that they acquire particular knowledge and skill. Standardized tests are generally administered at the end of the year when it is too late to make much use of them for teaching; they are used to provide a basis for evaluation of student learning and of the effectiveness of instruction (e.g., at the class, school, district, state or provincial level). Such tests generally employ the multiple-choice format for reasons of economy and objectivity, even though they are strongly biased toward the assessment of factual knowledge at the expense of comprehension, and toward the ability to recognize a correct solution to a problem rather than to actually generate a solution. There usually is no way for a teacher to discover to what extent a student has acquired a deep understanding of the concepts, principles and methods within a domain from scores on multiple-choice tests. Furthermore, there is an obvious mismatch between the types of tasks used to build competencies and monitor performance during learning, and the multiple-choice tests used to evaluate learning.
