EVALUATION AND SELFASSESSMENT SYSTEMS FOR THE VIRTUAL TEACHING: MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONNAIRES Claudio Cameselle, Susana Gouveia Departamento de Enxeñería Química. Universidade de Vigo

 Education is the process in which the teacher transmits knowledge about techniques and procedures to students. The learning process is satisfactory as long as students have achieved the skills defined in the syllabus at the end of the course. This requires a final assessment in which students must solve theoretical and practical questions, or put another way, the students must solve a questionnaire about the key concepts of the subject. Traditionally, the evaluation of the students was done at the end of the semester. It allowed to get an idea of the abilities the students have gain in the course. However, if the result were not satisfactory, little or nothing could be done because the course was completed. Hence the idea of training and continuous evaluation arises. The teacher should monitor the daily work of students who are encouraged to participate in class and are given tasks to solve every day. Thus, the teacher receives information from the education of students on an ongoing basis. Depending on the needs of each student, changes in the program, revision of concepts, exercises etc. can be made. This can be done in a personalized manner for each student. In virtual teaching where there is no physical space-time convergence between teachers and students, monitoring students' education is even more important.

 The success of training in virtual learning will largely depend on the ongoing work of the students, and this requires a strong motivation and close monitoring by the teacher. Tools for assessment and self-assessment may help to accomplish the student’s motivation and supervision. Among these tools, multiple choice questions are particularly attractive because they can be corrected automatically, which reduces the teacher's job, increases the independence of students and provide an immediacy to education would not have if using another type of questionnaires.  However, the development of multiple choice questions is not easy or obvious. Among the major errors in developing a multiple choice questionnaire are: questions and answers ambiguous, wrong definition of questions, more than one answer may be correct, two or more answers are equivalent, obvious questions and answers, etc. This paper attempts to bring this type of error from real questionnaires used in the evaluation of College students. This paper proposes possible solutions to create good multiple choice questionnaires.

Typical Cases  Wrong-defined questions  Difficulty of questions and ambiguity  Questions too general  Very specific questions  Wrong-defined question and answer  All answers are correct, none is correct.  Wrong stated questions  Words have more than one meaning

Conclusions  In summary, we can conclude that to make a good multiple choice questionnaires, professors should use complete sentences for questions and answers. The questions must be focused on the topic. The questions have to be clear and no ambiguous. Questions and answers should be focused on a specific aspect of the topic. It is recommended the number of options to be four: one should be "absurd", the correct choice and another one should be very similar, but without the ambiguity; and the fourth option should be halfway between the correct and the absurd options. So, professors can measure the degree of knowledge of students, and they can even measure if the questionnaire was filled in randomly. Professors should avoid using options such as "all/none is correct."