Principal Investigator:
Dr. Les Perelman - MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies

Project Overview:

The MIT / Microsoft iCampus Alliance is funding the development of a national web-based service that will allow colleges and universities to administer valid and educationally relevant online writing tests. Moreover, this service can be expanded to provide online evaluation and feedback not only for writing but for other academic skills as well.

Description:

Evaluation and assessment have become a central element of educational reform in America. Traditional forms of testing, however, do not always measure the specific skills that students need within the particular contexts in which they will be using them. Traditional tests of student writing ability, for example, require students to sit in a room and spend one or two hours writing on topics that they have never seen before. These tests do not allow a student to think through a topic, write a draft, and then revise it. They usually require students to write only a first draft using a pen or pencil even though many students are now much more comfortable writing on a computer, which will be the primary tool they will use to write both in college and afterwards. Moreover, both college and professional writing is rarely impromptu. People usually write in contexts in which they are familiar with the topic and have time to revise and edit.

Over the past four years, MIT has a developed a web-based online essay evaluation service that provides a more realistic testing situation. Using this service, students:

• Register for the test online
• Access online reading
• Access essay questions about the readings
• Plan, write, and revise, their paper
• Submit their essays online through the Web
• Receive the test results along with detailed written feedback on their essays

Now the iCampus initiative is sponsoring a collaborative effort with other colleges and universities to create a nationally accessible Web service, built on Microsoft's .NET technology, to facilitate the assessment of the actual set of writing skills that students will need both in college and in their professional careers. This service will allow:

• Tests to include readings and information similar to those students encounter in college courses
• Students to take the test at home using a computer and familiar word processing software with enough time to think about the topics, plan their essays, and revise them
• Evaluators to design tests that reflect their own institutions' educational philosophy and priorities
• Administrators to reduce significantly the hardware, software, and administrative costs of providing online testing
• Universities and colleges the opportunity to share test experiences, materials, and best practices
• High school teachers and students access to sample tests and exemplary student essays

MIT is forming a consortium with four other universities (CalTech, University of Cincinnati, LSU, and DePaul) to develop a beta version of this national service for the summer of 2002. This group is expected to expand to over ten universities and colleges by the summer of 2003 and to over thirty by 2004.

Although this initial effort is focused on writing tests, this service will be capable of expanding to cover any sort of evaluation situation in which students need time and resources unavailable in a standard classroom during a timed examination. Although these tests may never completely replace timed examinations, they will probably become a complementary form of assessment, especially in fields such as history, literature, anthropology, and political science but also, possibly, in science and engineering as well.