A COMPUTER ASSESSMENT TOOL FOR STRUCTURAL COMMUNICATION GRID
ABSTRACT
Assessment is one of the most important part of educational process that directs teaching, learning as well as curriculum development. However, widely used classical assessment techniques such as multiple choice tests are not adequate to provide neither a correct picture of students’ performances nor the effectiveness of the teaching process. Structural Communication Grid is an alternative assessment approach to classical multiple choice tests because it reveals students’ ideas and reasoning by forcing them to organize interrelated set of givens rather than focusing on the correct answer. The set of givens such as statements, graphics, pictures, etc can be presented as a grid of numbered boxes each containing a piece of information. The grid is usually designed to contain more than one correct choice in order to externalize the student’s conceptual structure and to assess their degrees of meaningful learning. Several questions could be designed with the same set of givens in order to avoid finding the correct choices by elimination method. However, it is difficult to implement and evaluate it by paper and pencil tests since both the boxes chosen and the choosing order are required to be graded. In this study, the basic features and elements of the first computerized version of structural communication grid tester, called SCGT, will be presented and its possible contributions to mathematics education will be discussed.