Online testing as an effective tool for learning English by higher education students in the context of distance learning

Lecturer

Annotation

The aim of this article is to give an overview of the most popular approaches to applying testing in the field of education. Traditionally, testing is considered to be one of the most effective forms of quality control of the learning process. Tests can be used to assess students in a classroom for the purpose of grading, as well as to make general comparisons of students ' achievements when it is necessary to determine their overall level of knowledge against the others. The use of testing in the educational process has its advantages and disadvantages. A lot of national and foreign scientists recognize that testing is a qualitative, objective and fair way of assessment, although it is not able to assess high-performance levels of knowledge related to creativity. It should be acknowledged that the forms and techniques of testing in the educational process have changed due to the use of new information technologies. In particular, online tests have become the main assessment tool for distance learning. In addition to checking knowledge, online testing is widely used to consolidate the material studied. The purpose of such educational online testing is not to assess the level of academic achievements of higher education students but to motivate them to self-education which is crucially important in a distance learning environment. The approach to online testing as an efficient toolfor learning English is especially relevant for higher education students due to the current trend towards reducing classroom instruction in favour of independent work. Regular online testing can be an effective method of organizing students' independent work quality self-control.

Key words: online testing, English language learning, advantages, disadvantages, selfeducation, distance learning.

Анотація

ОНЛАЙН-ТЕСТУВАННЯ ЯК ЕФЕКТИВНИЙ ІНСТРУМЕНТ ВИВЧЕННЯ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ СТУДЕНТАМИ ВИЩИХ НАВЧАЛЬНИХ ЗАКЛАДІВ В УМОВАХ ДИСТАНЦІЙНОГО НАВЧАННЯ

Світлана Слободяк викладач

Ізмаїльський державний гуманітарний університет, Україна

Мета цієї статті - дати огляд найбільш популярних підходів до застосування тестування у сфері освіти. Традиційно, тестування вважається однією з найефективніших форм контролю якості навчального процесу. Тести можуть використовуватися як для оцінювання учнів в аудиторії з метою виставлення оцінок, так і для загального порівняння учнівських досягнень, коли необхідно визначити їх загальний рівень знань. Використання тестування в навчальному процесі має свої переваги та недоліки. Багато вітчизняних і зарубіжних науковців визнають, що тестування є якісним, об 'єктивним і справедливим способом оцінювання, хоча воно не здатне оцінити високопродуктивні рівні знань, пов 'язані з творчістю. Слід визнати, що форми та напрями застосування тестування в навчальному процесі змінилися завдяки використанню нових інформаційних технологій. Зокрема, основним інструментом оцінювання знань здобувачів вищої освіти під час дистанційного навчання стали онлайн-тести. Крім перевірки знань, онлайн-тестування можна широко використовувати для закріплення вивченого матеріалу. Метою такого навчального онлайн-тестування є не оцінка рівня навчальних досягнень здобувачів вищої освіти, а мотивація їх до самоосвіти, що є надзвичайно важливим в умовах дистанційного навчання. Підхід до онлайн-тестування як до інструменту навчання є особливо актуальним у зв 'язку з сучасною тенденцією до скорочення аудиторних годин на користь самостійної роботи. Регулярне онлайн-тестування може стати ефективним методом організації самоконтролю якості виконання самостійної роботи здобувачами вищої освіти.

Ключові слова: онлайн-тестування, вивчення англійської мови, переваги, недоліки, самоосвіта, дистанційне навчання.

Problem statement

Nowadays, distance learning is becoming an important component of modern higher education. First, the coronavirus pandemic forced all educators to adapt and reorganize their work to a remote mode. Now, the war in Ukraine brings new challenges every day: the destruction of educational establishments, internally displaced students and teachers who are forced to study and work under new conditions across Ukraine and abroad, the «dropping out» of the educational material because of air raid alerts, hostility activities and other war-related reasons. In order to improve the situation, higher education teachers try to find various ways of organizing educational process in a distance format, among which developing and including ecourses into the learning environment prove to be very effective. The implementation of e-courses in higher education has changed the attitude of teachers to the traditional components of the learning process that were established in the previous years. One of such components is testing as a type of control over the quality of higher education students' mastering the learning content.

Recent publications overview

The use of testing in education has always been a subject of debate in the works of various scientists. Many foreign and national scholars have made a significant contribution to the study of this problem, among which the works of Henry L. Rodiger III, Adam L. Putnam, Megan A. Smith, L.O. Kukhar, V.P. Sergienko, and others are of great importance.

Aim and objectives

The aim of this article is to give an overview of the most popular approaches to using testing in education. Special attention is paid to the use of online testing as an effective tool for learning English by higher education students in a distance learning environment. Achieving this goal involves solving the following tasks: to describe various approaches to the use of tests in education; to highlight their advantages and disadvantages; to discuss the potential of embedding online-testing in the process of teaching and learning English in higher education institutions in the framework of distance education.

Main research material presentation

In the system of education a test is traditionally used as a model for checking knowledge. Tests are usually done «for purposes of assessment, to assign students grades (from tests in classrooms) or rank them in terms of abilities (in standardized tests)» (Roediger et al., 2011: 1).

Various types of tests in classrooms might be used. If it is necessary to determine what a student knows at the beginning of a course, diagnostic testing usually happens. Teachers use diagnostic testing information to guide what and how they are going to teach. If testing is used throughout a lesson, it helps the teacher to monitor whether the students have understood the material of the lesson. Such formative testing helps teachers to correct their students' mistakes before they become fossilized. Benchmark testing is used by teachers to understand whether the students have mastered certain section of the material which they have already been taught. This type of assessment allows teachers to realize how their students have grasped the material that has been covered. If there is a need to assess how much content have been learned overall, summative testing is held. «This type of testing is similar to benchmark testing, but instead of only covering one unit, it cumulatively covers everything students have been spending time on throughout the year» (O'Malley, 2015).

The purpose of standardized tests is to determine how much a student has learned in a certain subject or generally. Such tests are always taken under the same conditions and are scored in a consistent way to be able to compare your score with others. Some standardized tests which are taken in high school are: ACT (American College Testing), SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test), AP (Advanced Placement) exams, PERT (Postsecondary Education Readiness Test), PSAT (Preliminary Scholastic Assessment Test) (Frank, 2021). Standardized tests might be taken in the system of higher education as well. For example, for students pursuing a master's degree it's often necessary to take the GREs which stand for Graduate Record Exams. Such tests are designed to help admissions committees determine whether or not an applicant is likely to succeed in a graduate school program. If you want to go to a business school, you'll have to take the GMAT, which stands for Graduate Management Admission Test. The exam is offered to business students worldwide, and is recognized by most MBA programs. The aim of this exam is to measure analytical writing skills, quantitative skills, and verbal skills -- including reading comprehension, critical thinking, and sentence correction («Standardized Tests», n.d.).

Experts in the field of teaching have different approaches to the forms and types of testing, but all of them agree that the use of testing in the educational process has its pros and cons. For example, Ukrainian researchers L.O. Kukhar and V.P. Serhiienko note that testing is a highquality, objective and fair way of assessment, which allows teachers to determine the level of knowledge both in the subject as a whole and in its separate sections. In addition, according to the scientists, testing is more effective from an economical and psychological point of view, as the cost of testing is much lower than organizing oral control, and the emotional state of test participants is much better due to reducing pre-examination nervous tension. Among the most significant shortcomings, the authors mention the lack of ability «to check and assess highly productive levels of knowledge related to creativity, i.e. probabilistic, abstract and methodological knowledge» (Kukhar & Serhiienko, 2010: 40).

Henry L. Roediger III, Adam L. Putnam and Megan A. Smith in their work «Ten Benefits of Testing and their Applications to Educational Practice» give an overview of advantages of using testing in education. According to the researchers, the benefits of testing include 10 ideas which can be summarized in the following way:

Benefit 1. The testing effect: retrieval aids later retention.

The basic testing effect is that the information retrieved from a learner's memory leads to better performance on a later test (Roediger et al., 2011: 4).

Benefit 2. Testing identifies gaps in knowledge.

Taking a test permits students to assess what they know and what they do not know, so that they can concentrate their study efforts on the areas in which their knowledge is deficient (Roediger et al., 2011: 8).

Benefit 3. Testing causes students to learn more from the next learning episode.

Taking a test can enhance learning during future study sessions. The essence of the test potentiation effect is as follows: when students take a test and then restudy the material, they learn more from the presentation than they would if they restudied without taking a test (Roediger et al., 2011: 10).

Benefit 4. Testing produces better organization of knowledge.

Regular testing can improve the conceptual organization of practiced materials, as students actively recall the studied material and are more likely to notice important details to weave them into a cohesive structure (Roediger et al., 2011: 12).

Benefit 5. Testing improves transfer of knowledge to new contexts.

Testing induces readily accessible information that can be flexibly used to solve new problems (Roediger et al., 2011: 14).

Benefit 6. Testing can facilitate retrieval of information that was not tested.

Retrieval practice does not simply enhance retention of the individual items retrieved during the initial test: taking a test can also produce retrieval-induced facilitation--a phenomenon showing that testing also improves retention of non-tested but related material (Roediger et al., 2011: 17).

Benefit 7. Testing improves metacognitive monitoring.

Testing permits students to determine what material they know well and what material they do not know well, thus accurately predicting their future performance. In case of making inaccurate predictions, testing can help compensate for the tendency to be overconfident, which results in a more accurate assessment of learning (Roediger et al., 2011: 20).

Benefit 8. Testing prevents interference from prior material when learning new material.

Tests can create a release from proactive interference. Proactive interference occurs when sets of materials are learned in succession; the previous material learned influences the retention of new materials in a negative manner. The researchers are sure that when tests are inserted between study episodes, they cause a release from proactive interference and enable new learning to be more successful (Roediger et al., 2011: 22).

Benefit 9. Testing provides feedback to instructors.

Testing can provide teachers with valuable feedback about what students do and do not know, and teachers in turn can encourage students to change their study behavior (Roediger et al., 2011: 24).

Benefit 10. Frequent testing encourages students to study.

Having frequent quizzes, tests, or assignments motivates students to study. More frequent testing across the semester would encourage students to study more and would space their studying over several weeks (Roediger et al., 2011: 26).

We can't but agree with this list of benefits, supporting the idea of highly-effective use of testing in education, although some negative consequences of testing are also possible. Among them the authors mention, first of all, taking time away from other critical classroom activities, such as lectures or discussions, for example. The second drawback mentioned is «rote» learning as the result of retrieval practice through testing which might lead to parroting back the information but not to getting deep knowledge. The third disadvantage is connected with retrieval-induced forgetting. «The fear is that if students repeatedly retrieve some information, they may actually cause themselves to forget other information» (Roediger et al., 2011: 29). The fourth negative side is that the structure of some tests may lead to acquisition of erroneous knowledge. The authors speak about the negative suggestibility effect which might occur on the cued recall test later, in case the students answered erroneously on earlier true/false and multiple-choice tests. The danger of learning the wrong information is real, but «if feedback is provided after the tests», as the authors faithfully admit, there are «no major drawbacks in using tests as a learning mechanism» (Roediger et al., 2011: 31).

Despite these and other shortcomings, testing remains one of the most effective control components of the learning process. But the use of testing is currently deepening and expanding in our new learning environment, which is being formed under the influence of modern digitalization achievements. The forms and directions of application of testing in the educational process are changing due to the use of new information technologies. In particular, online tests have become the main tool for testing knowledge during distance learning. Among the advantages of online testing Ukrainian researchers highlight the following: high speed and versatility (in a short period of time you can check the knowledge associated with a large amount of the material studied); objectivity and accuracy (online testing allows to eliminate the human factor, the developed scale and clear evaluation criteria give an accurate result); automation (the test is checked by a machine, not by a specialist); justice (all the students are on equal terms and can write a test for a high score); clarity and predictability (you can predict the result and prepare in advance, which makes online testing less stressful than other types of control) («Onlain-testy», 2020).

Apart from being used to test knowledge, online testing is widely used to consolidate the material learned. For example, when studying the elective subject «Communicative English Course» at Izmail State University of Humanities, higher education students have an opportunity to take an online test on the Moodle educational platform after each practical class. After taking such a test at home, it's quite typical for students to ask questions and to discuss problematic points regarding the tested study material in the next practical session. Besides, such a discussion can be useful for the teacher from the methodological point of view, since the feedback received from higher education students can help the teacher to improve the learning process in the future. Such educational online tests have three attempts at an answer with the «average grade» method of assessment. However, online testing has no academic grade value, which means that the grades received have no influence upon higher education students' academic achievements. The purpose of such educational testing is not to assess the level of educational achievements of higher education students, but to motivate them for self-education and self-examination.

«Motivation is an essential ingredient in effective teaching and learning. It not only yields more positive behaviour in students, but it also contributes to a greater sense of wellbeing» (Hawthorne, 2021). Motivation to study is especially crucial in the case of distance learning, which inevitably reduces the curiosity of higher education students, who are overloaded with information without knowing how to process and use it correctly and efficiently. This is aggravated by a constant psycho-emotional stress, a decrease in the quality of life and health, lack of desire to develop their creative potentials for fear of not achieving success. In case of educational online testing all these problems vanish. The learners can do testing in convenient time and place, they are not afraid of getting bad test results because they do not influence their academic performance, they have several attempts to find and correct their mistakes to succeed later, they have the feeling of achievement satisfaction which encourages their further self-education.

A lot of researchers agree that using online testing for students' self-learning is very helpful for us, teachers, especially in the distance learning environment where we are necessitated to work because of various outer factors. «The test can be built into the structure of pedagogical activity not only at the stage of monitoring and evaluating the results, but also be used at the stage of designing and organizing pedagogical interactions and act as an independent means of teaching and self-learning. The latter is of particular importance in the framework of distance learning, because the possibilities for the organization of live communication, including its verbal and nonverbal components, are reduced, which means the difficulty, and sometimes even complete impossibility, for the teacher to receive feedback and evaluate the effectiveness of the pedagogical influence. In this case, the organization of the self-learning process becomes more important» (Shandulin & Dmitrieva, 2021: 3).

The approach to online testing as a learning tool is also relevant in view of the existing trends to reduce classroom activities in favor of independent work. In the modern educational process, the main thing is to teach higher education students to acquire knowledge independently. This is the reason for the significant increase in the number of hours devoted to students' independent work in higher education. It is possible to count on a positive result in such a situation only if the quality control of students' independent work is established. The method of organizing such control can be self-control in the form of regular online testing as an important part of the educational process.

By regularly doing educational tests, higher education students carry out self-monitoring of the quality of their educational activities, as well as effectively prepare for summative assessment in the form of a module test. Writing a module test also takes place in the form of online testing on the Moodle platform, but with one attempt given. The biggest advantage of this form of summative assessment is the ability to automatically create an individual test for each higher education student from the available question bank of the course. In addition, tests are composed of questions of different levels of complexity, and the number of such questions of different levels will be the same for all test participants. Summative online testing always takes place according to the schedule and lasts for a limited period of time. All test participants take the test at the same time, but everyone gets their own individual version, which makes it impossible to cheat.

When learning takes place with the help of online testing, writing a module test online is no longer stressful for higher education students. However, as some researchers note, online testing does not take into account such individual psychological features of higher education students as «speed of thinking and peculiarities of attention» (Medynska, 2011: 82). But if educational online tests are done on a regular basis and the students are used to their structure, if the instructions for the test procedure are clear and precise, if test tasks are formulated briefly and accurately, the learners being tested will immediately focus their attention on test task solving without wasting their time on reading typical instructions to the tests and explanations to the tasks. As a result, all the learners, despite their differences, will timely and successfully cope with online testing.

Conclusion

Thus, in the context of distance learning, the role of online testing is significantly expanded. The idea of multifunctional use of testing in education comes to the fore. The traditional use of online testing for assessment purposes is often supplemented with educational online testing which helps higher education students to improve the process of their learning English in a distance learning environment. The goal of such educational testing is not to assess the level of educational performance of higher education students, but to motivate them to self-learning and self-analysis. Educational online testing is particularly effective in view of the tendency to increase the number of hours for higher education students' independent work in the curricula of higher education institutions. Regular online testing can serve as the quality control of students' independent work in the framework of distance learning. The potential of using online testing in the educational process remains limitless and requires further research.

References

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