Open text
based assessment / open book examination
Definition
OTBA may be defined as a process of evaluation based
on examination in which text/picture/chart material etc. is supplied prior to
examination and allowed to take reference from those materials while
examination In India CBSE is going to conduct OTBA for ix and xiith
classes from 2014 onward.
Schools will be supplied with "textual material in a
few months before the commencement of SA-ii. A textual material may be in the
form of an article, a case study, a diagram, a concept/mind map, a picture or a
cartoon, problem/situation based on the concepts taught to be students during
second term”. Textual material will be related to chosen concepts taken from
the syllabi.
"OTBA will have questions of higher order thinking
skills some of which may be subjective, creative and open ended”. Students will
be able to refer to that material during exam, “textual material supplied earlier
will be printed again as part of the question paper and thus will be available
while answering the questions".
For std. xi, the OTBA will be applicable only to economics,
biology and geography. This will be part of the final exam in March. CBSE advised
schools to mark the answer sheets based on four criterions.
·
First is the student's understanding and
application of the concepts to the situational problems,
·
Second being ability to suggest and bring out
the appropriate solutions to the problem,
·
Third is the ability to come up with innovative
opinions and fourth the ability to deeply analyse, based on a wide range of
perspectives.
OTBA will comprise
15%-20% of the total marks and may also include value-based questions, which is
already part of the current set up. Since std. ix comes under the continuous
and comprehensive evaluation scheme, the March OTBA will be part of summative
assessment-ii (SA-ii).
How will this affect the Indian education system?
Against
The steps taken by CBSE may seem innovative but they are
going so fast that Indian education system may not find hard to accept the
changes
·
is teachers of Indian education system are able
to properly judge the student's analysing technique, innovative opinion etc.?
Judging these for common school teachers
might be a tough work
·
with already grading system and marks for practical
and assessments it’s easy to score marks in fairly easy and sometimes unfair
means
·
Weaker students will don't pay attention to studies.
·
for the proper assessments of students in OTBA
it will requires question set to an above average level which can test the
higher thinking skills of students and highly qualified teachers.
Favour
The world is advancing so our education system but with the
university exam dominated by closed book, invigilated pen and paper tests, it
is the need of hour to judge our students differently given the human capital
needs of a knowledge economy, not just because of the absence of technology that
is used routinely in everyday business and commerce, but because this type of
examination instrument is incompatible with constructivist learning theory that
favours deep learning. It is further argued that a commitment to authentic
assessment will pave the way for a different type of final examination, where
real-world problems are allowed to take Centre-stage, and multi-media can be
harnessed to provide the learner with a more engaging experience.
With greater engagement, this, in turn, can yield better
results in terms of the depth of student learning. An on-going research project
with an open book, open web examination format at u21global has yielded Positive
results in terms of student perceptions of this examination instrument compared
to the Invigilated, closed book type exam. Importantly, OTBA is a
transferable model that can just as easily be administered in an on campus
setting as online, and while there will always be a small number of students who
will cheat, the main priority should be to focus on the higher quality learning
outcomes of the majority, rather than set up an entire system to stop a small
minority. Certainly, if there is roughly equal Scope for cheating (as the
results of two student surveys would seem to suggest) then it would make sense
to opt for the model that maximises student learning.A limitation of this study
involves the methodological considerations pertaining to measurement issues, Sampling
units, and the number of variables investigated in this study. Subsequently,
this limits the generalizability of the findings reported. Hence, replications
with more representative samples of respondents and extensions of measurement
scales are planned for the future.
Further references may be taken from
Biggs, j (1999). Teaching for quality learning at university,
oxford university press, oxford.
Carrier, d. (1990). Legislation as a stimulus to innovation.
Higher education management, 2(1), 88-98.
Chapman, k. J., davis, r., toy, d. & wright, l. (2004).
Academic integrity in the business school
Environment: i'll get by with a little help from my friends.
Journal of marketing education, 26 (3),
236-250.
Herrington, j. & herrington, a. (1998). Authentic
assessment and multimedia: how university students
Respond to a model of authentic assessment. Higher education
research and development, 17(3),
305-322.
Kleiner, c. & lord, m. (1999). The cheating game. U.s.
news & world report, 127 (20), 54-63.
Lam, w., williams, j. B., & chua, a. Y. K. (2007).
E-xams: harnessing the power of icts to enhance
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209-221.
Http://www.ifets.info/journals/10_3/14.pdf [viewed 9 aug
2007].
Mcmurtry, k. (2001). E-cheating: combating a 21st century
challenge, teaching and higher education
Journal, 29 (4), 36-41.
Sims, r. (2004). Trends, fads and futures: 21 years of
educational multimedia: where have we got to, and
Where should we go? Proceedings of world conference on
educational multimedia, hypermedia and
Telecommunications 2004 (pp. 3755-3766). Chesapeake, va:
aace.
Wiggins, g. (1998). Educative assessment. San francisco:
jossey bass.
Williams, j.b. (2004) creating authentic assessments: a
method for the authoring of open book open web
Examinations. In r. Atkinson, c. Mcbeath, d. Jonas-dwyer
& r. Phillips (eds), beyond the comfort
Zone: proceedings of the 21st ascilite conference, pp.
934-937.
Williams, j.b. (2006) the place of the closed book,
invigilated final examination in a knowledge
Economy. Educational media international, 43(2), 107-119.