A Report on the Application of Adaptive Testing in a First Year University Course

Assessment in education is a crucial task. The adoption of adaptive instead of classical testing poses questions from both a teacher and student perspective. According to the literature, teachers should experience shorter times to complete the assessment and obtain more precise evaluations, albeit at the cost of calibrating their questions. As for the students, adaptive testing does not allow to revise the already given questions, which is usually seen as a detrimental characteristic. On the other hand, adaptation seems to increase their engagement. Given these premises, the paper describes the system for online assessment currently under development in the University of L’Aquila and reports on the research questions mentioned above. The results are positive (i.e., no particular usability issues, no problems for the item calibration process), inline with the literature (i.e., FIT is considered easier than CAT, CAT is more efficient than FIT) even if we cannot confirm that CAT is more engaging than FIT. These results, in summary, show that CAT should not introduce issues in the assessment process and could be experimented by professors and students with reasonable safety.