Проблеми комп’ютерного тестування знань у сучасній освіті

Abstract

Представлену роботу присвячено питанню перевірки знань студентів як одного із способів мотивування навчання. На даний час є актуальною задача використання сучасних інформаційних технологій для контролю знань студентів у період між сесіями, під час складання заліків у великої кількості студентів у стислі терміни, перевірки рівня засвоєння навчального матеріалу у разі самопідготовки, а також для самотестування знань студентами без участі викладача. Останній фактор – найбільш важливий у випадку дистанційного навчання. The work is devoted to the issues connected with testing students as a way to motivate learning within higher education. In modern education, an urgent task is the implementation of information technologies in order to control the assimilation of students’ knowledge within the periods between sessions, in the course of having pass / fail credits and taking examinations for a small period of time. Furthermore, the designated method of verifying the level of knowledge is indispensable for self-preparation as well as in the case of distance learning. The latter is gaining tremendous popularity at the present time not only with young people but also with adult population when it is necessary to improve their knowledge or change their profession. Testing as an instrument for remote control of knowledge is of particular importance; it is also a method which facilitates testing of the quality of information assimilation concerning concepts, representations, regulations of selected disciplines. The inclusion of testing in the learning process can improve its organization and quality. Note that test tasks should be developed in accordance with the requirements that are imposed on a particular discipline. The content of the tests should cover all the basic concepts used in the field under study. This makes it possible to universalize and make the approaches to mastering knowledge unified within the framework of this object of study. Thus, computer testing allows us, on the one hand, to monitor the quality of mastering students' knowledge, and on the other hand, to quantify their level of mastering. In addition, computer testing can be used to assess the effectiveness of one or another method of teaching and organization of the educational process, including the use of modern computer technologies. However, we should not overestimate testing as one of the ways to control knowledge. This way of testing knowledge has certain limitations: 1. the use of testing does not allow us to fully create the ability to consistently expound your thoughts, built on the basis of the obtrained knowledge, logical conclusions that allow you to apply theoretical knowledge in nonstandard situations. This is due to the fact that a good visual memory is a guarantee of excellent answers to test assignments. Students mechanically remember the correct answer without comprehending its content; 2. the data obtained from testing knowledge gaps in specific sections can not help to eliminate these gaps. To eliminate gaps, additional work with students is required. While testing students in an oral way, the examiner, as a rule, conducts a dialogue with a student, sets leading questions, forcing a student to illustrate practical examples with theoretical knowledge. As a result, the level of conscious understanding of the issues covered by a discipline increases; 3. there is always an element of randomness in testing: a student who does not answer a simple question can give the right answer to a more complex one. The reason for this may be a simple guessing of an answer, especially when dealing with tests with a low level of complexity. Standard sets of test tasks for most disciplines are elaborated in a simple form. Usually they are collections of questions and tasks which presuppose a choice of one or several correct answers from the proposed ones. While elaborating tests which are adequate to the task is a complex, multilevel process, corresponding to many principles: the correspondence of the test contents to the purposes of testing, the determination of the significance of the tested knowledge, the relationship between the contents and a form, the content correctness of the test tasks, the representativeness of an academic discipline in the contents of the test, the complexity and balance of the test contents, systemic contents, contents variability. For the past four years at the National University «Odessa Maritime Academy» computer testing has been conducted twice a semester in the course of study of general and special disciplines. As a result, the obtained statistics testifies that this method of knowledge control increases motivation in training, systematizes this knowledge, improves teachers’ work.