An Empirical Study on the Effect of Different Technology Environments on Students’ Assessment

Multiple choice question (MCQ)-based assessment for higher education students can be a solution to reduce workload where teacher-student ratio is significantly high and also in distance learning approaches. Originating from the users problem claiming that “web-based and mobile-based tests are inconvenient and does not allow expected performance”, this research poses the question, “Does use of different technology environment has any positive or negative effect on the students’ assessment or performance?” To seek answer to this question, students of three sections of a private university in Bangladesh attended MCQ tests under the same instructor’s lecture and appeared for the tests using paper based, web-based and mobile SMS-based testing systems. Results of such tests are analyzed. The variance test shows that paper-based, web-based and mobile-based test scores do not vary. Problems experienced in implementing such web-based and SMS based system in Bangladesh are discussed. In Bangladesh, some telecentres has been established by government and NGOs which are engaged in educating people in the rural and remote areas of the country. This low-cost
SMS-based testing can be used for testing trainees of these telecentres and assessment can be centralized, if uninterrupted power supply can be ensured, contents can be shared and tests can be arranged through the web-based LMSs.