E-assessment in high-level cognitive courses: Improving student engagement and results

Introducing e-assessment in high-level cognitive courses is still a difficult issue, especially when adapting theoretical models and systems to real courses. One of the challenges is that most of the e-assessment tools offer simple types of questions such as Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ), which does not allow proper assessment for skills. Another challenge is to find an appropriate way to offer formative assessment in this type of courses through both practice and assessment facilities with personalized feedback. In this paper, a general e-assessment system and a formative e-assessment model for high-level cognitive courses are presented. They allow going beyond MCQ type of questions, and an easy adaptation to different learning scenarios. The model and the system are applied into an actual high-level cognitive course, a Logic course of a Computer Science degree program in a fully online learning environment. As a result, it showed that students' participation in the continuous assessment has increased. Overall when comparing students' results before and after the introduction of the e-assessment system, it shows that with the introduction of the system, students' performance, in terms of students' marks had improved.