Mixing Standards, IRT and Pedagogy for Quality e-Assessment

E-Assessment is a relatively new concept use to designate the evaluation process done using computer assistance. The assessment could be carried out within a complete e-learning system or thanks to an independent tool dedicated to this purpose. In any case, assessment is a very important part in the learning process that must be understood not as a mere step to go to the next lesson or course, but as a way to continue learning. In this respect it is more significant for online learning than it is for traditional one [1]. There are multiple factors that affect e-assessment. Mainly, it is important to pay attention to Pedagogy and Standards. The first one supplies different psychometric techniques to adapt assessments to learners’ level knowledge and abilities [2, 3], as well as other pedagogical techniques to achieve quality assessments [4]. The latest provides rules to design items and tests, and lets teachers exchange them with other mates, which enrich the assessment process of each teacher. This paper presents a new tool for creation and delivery of adaptive assessment in any domain. All the factors commented before have being taken into account to develop an easy-to-use tool that lets teacher to define items and test as well as import/export them from/to other systems/tools. Then, once the items and tests are stored, the tool is prepared to deliver different types of assessment. The next section introduces some pedagogical details that should be applied when building up a complete e-assessment tool, as well as some notions about assessment standards. It also comments some available tools/systems that work the assessment process, highlighting their strength and weakness. Section four explains the necessity of a new assessment tool and enumerates the advantages of the proposed tool, focusing on Pedagogy and Standards. Finally, section five presents the conclusions.