Written exams, which are intended to examine students on the course goals, can sometimes be passed without any conceptual knowledge by memorizing procedures or facts. Because future courses depend on the students’ understanding of concepts in the required courses, not knowing the concepts could be a major issue for the student, for the teacher and for the program board. Here, we focus on developing conceptual multiple-choice questions and the algorithms for understanding the answers to the questions. The goal is to be able to answer questions such as “For how long do the students remember the key concepts?” and “Which concepts do the courses have any positive (or negative) effect on?”. To do that, a courses-concepts matrix was created and the most central concepts were identified. Multiple-choice questions were written on those concepts and the questions were imported into the test creator Respondus. Feedback was added to the questions, they were grouped by concept and exported to a quiz bank in the educational platform Blackboard. A set of answers from a survey on report writing was obtained and statistics were written to answer the second question that was posed. An issue with the probability function is that it only considers whether the student had a setback or an improvement, not how significant it was. The next step would be to use the slopes more effectively by considering the magnitude of the improvement or setback. / Developing Concept Inventory Tests for Electrical Engineering

Thesis (Master of Education (Education)--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2008 / This research aims to establish the relationship between language acquisition for isiXhosa as an additional language and the use of e-learning as well as the effect that such an approach will have on the students of the target group. The researcher selected a group of students from those whom she taught, and used e-learning by means of the Blackboard platform in the teaching process. A B-Ed 3 group was identified as target group out of which six candidates were randomly selected as case studies in order to monitor the process of implementation and usage. In an attempt to obtain underlying and rich information, they each maintained a journal about the e-learning usage, completed two questionnaires and attended a focus group discussion. These sources of information supplied data which reflected the students’ true feelings about e-learning. The lecturer, who had no previous experience of e-learning, attended e-learning courses and also from her perspective, noted the process of implementation in a journal. E-learning tasks were used as support to subject content which were used in the classroom. The students were therefore expected to attend all classes and complete the e-learning tasks outside of class time. The research determined that e-learning has the potential to be applied successfully to additional language teaching. Both the lecturer and the students experienced the process positively.