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DiBattista, David ; Gosse, Leanne, The Journal of Experimental Education, 22-JUN-06
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The authors examined the relationship between the reactions of undergraduate students to using the Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique (IF-AT), an answer form that provides immediate feedback on multiple-choice questions, for the first time on a major examination and their levels of test anxiety and trait anxiety. They also assessed whether students with higher levels of test anxiety and trait anxiety might be disadvantaged relative to other students by use of the IF-AT in a testing situation. They found that preference of undergraduates (N = 185) for the IF-AT was not related to test anxiety, nor did evidence indicate that the IF-AT put students with higher levels of test anxiety at a disadvantage with respect to test performance. Using the IF-AT did not generally increase test-related anxiety, and for a majority of students, immediate feedback actually reduced it. Nineteen percent of students felt that immediate feedback interfered with their test performance but would nevertheless still prefer to use the IF-AT in future tests. Potential concerns that test-anxious students may either dislike the IF-AT or be disadvantaged by its use appear unwarranted and should not deter instructors from adopting the IF-AT.
The study noted as an advantage to the use of the IF-AT that students not only readily accept its use, but they actually welcome it and would like to see its use expanded. More than 80% of undergraduates using the IF-AT for the first time indicated that they would like to be able to use the IF-AT in all of their courses that have multiple-choice tests, and 64% felt the IF-AT to be fairer than the more commonly used machine-scored answer form they were accustomed to using. Moreover, although they were using the IF-AT during an examination that counted for up to 30% of their course grade, 78% of students nevertheless indicated that the IF-AT made the test feel something like a game. Students' acceptance of the IF-AT has also been found to be essentially independent of both test performance and a variety of personal characteristics. For example, students' preference for the IF-AT was not found to be correlated with any of the following variables: overall test performance, performance on the multiple-choice portion of the test, age, number of courses previously taken, students' self-reported degree of preparedness for the test, and students' perceptions of the difficulty of the multiple-choice items. Overall, then, students' reactions to the IF-AT are positive across students with a broad range of characteristics, suggesting that its use may contribute to the important but usually neglected goal of creating a more positive reaction to testing among students (McMorris, Boothroyd, & Pietrangelo, 1997).
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