Article
Development of an Online-System for assessing the progress of knowledge acquisition in psychology
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Authors
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Thomas Ostermann
- Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Deutschland
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Jan P Ehlers
- Chair of Didactics and Educational Research in Health Science, Faculty of Health, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Deutschland
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Michaela Warzecha
- Centre for IT, Media and Knowledge Management, University of Applied Sciences, Hamm, Hamm, Deutschland
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Gregor Hohenbaerg
- Centre for IT, Media and Knowledge Management, University of Applied Sciences, Hamm, Hamm, Deutschland
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Michaela Zupanic
- Chair of Didactics and Educational Research in Health Science, Faculty of Health, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Deutschland
| Published: | August 29, 2017 |
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Outline
Text
Introduction: Results of summative examinations represent most often only a snapshot of the knowledge of students over a part of the curriculum and do not provide valid information on whether a long-term retention of knowledge and knowledge growth takes place, as the content of this course is normally not tested again [1]. Educational research very early has given attention to this problem by conducting memory tests to assess retention of knowledge [2], [3]. One modern form of assessing the retention of knowledge is given by progress testing developed in the 1990th in the Netherlands [4]. A progress test is defined as a “repeated assessment of students’ functional knowledge” [5] and consists of questions covering all domains of relevant knowledge from a given curriculum. This work describes the development and the structure of an online platform for progress testing in psychology at Witten/Herdecke University and gives first insight in preliminary results.
Methods: The Progress Test Psychology (PTP) consists of 100 items in single or multiple true-/false-format dealing with thematic statements from the modules of the curriculum. Answers are confidence-weighted with sure (+2) or unsure (+1) to assess the cumulated knowledge of students on the cognitive and meta-cognitive level. Moreover this construction reveals additional information on the impact of teaching and exams and allows for the reflexion of “not-knowing” [4]. The implementation of the PTP is based on the WINDOWs package XAMPP including an Apache Server, a MySQL-Database and PHP. This framework has been used for web-based student record management systems [6]. In addition JavaScript is used to react to the behavior of the user by dynamically adaption of the web-interface.
Results: Our database currently comprises complete time series from a total of four cohorts of students starting from summer 2015. We found highly significant (GLM repeated measures, α=5 %, p<0.0001) differences in the knowledge gain in Statistics (1.6 ± 1.9 vs. 5.8 ± 4.5; F=24.5), Psychological Research Methodology (1.1 ± 1.8 vs. 4.4 ± 2.8; F=28.9), Biological Psychology (0.7 ± 1.5 vs. 4.1 ± 2.4; F=48.7) and Personality Psychology (1.4 ± 1.9 vs. 4.3 ± 3.7; F=16.3) to mention only some domains. Others like Health Psychology, Epidemiology and Public Health have not such accelerated increase in acquired knowledge (0.3 ± 1.0 vs. 1.7 ± 2.0; F=12.1), as the respective module is yet to come for this cohort in the sixth semester. Total PTP-Score also increased from 18.1 ± 13.0 in the 1st semester to 47.9 ± 20.2 in the 4th semester (F=49.3, p<0.0001). By proven construct validity [7] the internal consistency differs from very good (PTP 01: α=0,91) to acceptable (PTP 04: α=0,71).
Discussion: The PTP-Online system allows students to directly gain understanding in their overall knowledge acquisition as well as in their scores per discipline and to compare their score with the average in their respective peer group. Due to its low threshold as a formative assessment students get an unstressed feedback on their level of acquired knowledge which might also help to encourage students to fill their deficits.
Die Autoren geben an, dass kein Interessenkonflikt besteht.
Die Autoren geben an, dass kein Ethikvotum erforderlich ist.
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