Development and Preliminary Evaluation of the Learning Potential of an Online System in Support of a Student-Generated Testlets Learning Activity

Currently, around fifty online learning systems have been developed to support student-generated questions (SGQ) activities, highlighting the various affordances of computers and networked technologies. While a variety of question types are commonly supported in these online SGQ systems, no systems are in existence that support student generation of the testlet format — an attractive test format that is becoming increasingly prevalent and prominent in contemporary testing and assessment practices. In view of this research gap, this study is aimed toward two research goals: first, to develop an online learning system in support of student-generated testlets learning activities, and second, to preliminarily assess its learning potential. Two general design principles that guide the development of the student-generated testlets online learning system (i.e., flexibility and cognitive support) are described first. Afterwards, the evaluation study used to assess the learning potential of student-generated testlets as compared to SGQ is presented. Based on the data collected from a sixth-grade class of students (n = 28), it was found that significantly more participants felt the online testlet-generation task as better promoting learning as compared to SGQ, X² = 9.93, p < .01. Furthermore, based on the result of the constant comparative method done on the participants’ provided explanatory reasons, the distinct feature of student-generated testlets, specifically, the situation/scenario, and its possible positive and negative effects on learning were highlighted to provide suggestions for future studies.