Beyond Multiple Choice: Nine Ways to Leverage Technology for Better Assessments - Wednesday, December 9, at 3 p.m. Eastern 

Effective assessments also help organizations improve performance, manage workforce competencies, and ensure regulatory compliance. How can you make the best use of online authoring, reporting, analytical, and security tools? This seminar provides a broad overview of some common ways technology can be used to enhance the impact of your assessments, including:

• Using question and topic based feedback to guide learning
• Making use of reporting and analytics to derive meaning from your assessments
• Organizing your questions in a centralized item bank structured to meet your organization’s needs
• Creating assessments that adapt and branch based on participant responses and scores
• Matching the delivery environment and technology to the stakes

Register today at:
http://www.questionmark.com/us/seminars/index.aspx#bmc

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Analyzing and Sharing Assessment Results with Questionmark Enterprise Reporter - Monday, November 23, at 3 p.m. Eastern

Enterprise Reporter enables Perception administrators to run reports and analyze the results within the Perception repository. This session explains each of the 12 reports in Enterprise Reporter and the data and statistics they contain.

Register today at:
http://www.questionmark.com/us/seminars/index.aspx#er

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Questionmark Perception Orientation - Offered twice each week

If you are new to computerized assessments or Questionmark Perception, this seminar provides an overview of Perception's features and how to use the software. You will receive basic information about how to write and deploy your quizzes, tests, and surveys using Perception. There will be plenty of time for questions and answers.

Register today at:
http://www.questionmark.com/us/seminars/index.aspx

Questionmark Breakfast Briefings are held at computer training centers and include hands-on introductions about authoring, delivering and reporting on assessments using Questionmark Perception and Questionmark Live.

Upcoming dates and locations:

• Chicago - Sept. 24
• Dallas - Oct. 6
• Washington D.C. - Oct. 8
• Washington D.C. - Oct. 9
• Atlanta - Oct. 20
• Los Angeles - Oct. 22

Learn more about Questionmark Breakfast Briefings

“Technologies for Selling Tests” is an optional enhancement to on-demand deployments of Questionmark Perception. The new service provides an ideal solution for test publishers interested in selling their tests to large institutions or those wishing to make quizzes, diagnostic assessments and other study aids available on a charge-per-use basis.

Tests and quizzes can be authored and saved to a repository using standard Questionmark Perception features. Content owners then use a browser-based application to define catalog items for their assessments, along with desired pricing and access limitations. Access to assessments in each catalog item may be sold individually via e-commerce transaction. Alternatively, publishers may opt to sell administrative credits for assessments in bulk. Key features and benefits of the solution include:

• Easy-to-use assessment catalog system
• Self-registration and automated scheduling
• Online payment processing
• Customizable: can be branded to your organization
• Secure content and results
• Customizable email templates for automated communication

Test publishers can now get a better return on their investment in creating and maintaining valid and reliable assessments using this rapidly deployable, secure, low-cost solution.

The Questionmark 2010 Users Conference is set for March 14 -17, so mark your calendar and start planning for a great learning experience. The conference, which will take place at the Miami Hilton Downtown, promises three days of excellent professional development opportunities including:

• Product training sessions
• Case studies
• Instruction on assessment best practices
• Peer discussions
• Meetings with Questionmark product managers
• One-on-one visits with Questionmark technicians

These types of resources give people the opportunity to contribute, discuss and consume knowledge. Embedding assessments into them offers an easy way to provide knowledge checks to reinforce learning and reduce forgetting. The benefits of doing this range from focusing learners' attention and giving them the opportunity to practice their memory recall to providing a seamless user experience that creates intrigue and helps participants identify what they need to focus on before they access learning material.

In most cases, embedding assessments in a blog or wiki is the same or very similar to using an iframe to embed an assessment in a regular web page. This involves two basic steps:

• Make a simple modification to the template file used by the assessment
• Add the iframe code containing to the desired assessment URL to your webpage
  

For an example of this, see Questionmark's quiz on writing test questions, which was posted to our blog using WordPress.

Questionmark Software Support Plan customers will find complete details about embedding assessments in the Questionmark Knowledge Base, which also includes specific instructions for embedding assessments using WordPress, E-Blogger, DokuWiki, Wikispaces, Sharepoint and Wetpaint.

Check out the following Questionmark knowledge base articles:

• Why would I want to embed an assessment in a wiki, web page or blog?
• Can I present an assessment within an iFrame?

What version of Perception is this service pack for?
This service pack is ONLY for Perception v4.4.

Where do I download Service Pack 4?
You will find two installation files for Service Pack 4 files (one for Perception Server and one for Authoring Manager) on the Questionmark website at: http://www.questionmark.com/communities/mydownloads.aspx

How do I install SP4?
See the this knowledge base article for installation instructions.

What issues are resolved by Service Pack 4?
Service Pack 4 includes resolutions and performance improvements that issues in both Perception Server and Authoring Manager. Click here for details.

What product enhancement is included in the Service Pack?
Adds support for Windows authentication of the shared repository database if you are using SQL Server 2005 as your database server. Please refer to this knowledge Base article for further information.

I have not installed Service Pack 1, Service Pack 2 or Service Pack 3 yet – do I need to install them before I install Service Pack 4?
No. It is not necessary to install the prior service packs. The Service Packs will automatically check your Perception Server and Authoring Manager installations to verify if previous Service Packs have been installed. If a previous Service Pack is not found, the latest Service Pack will automatically install any updates found in previous Service Packs ensuring that Perception Server and Authoring Manager remain up-to-date with the latest product enhancements and fixes. For more information, see the Knowledge Base article:  How do the new Perception Server 4.4 Service Packs work?

Key Questionmark staff will visit seven U.S. cities this fall to provide hands-on briefings and tutorials for people who want to learn the basics of creating, delivering and reporting on Questionmark Perception assessments.

Attend a hands-on morning tutorial to gain a working understanding of Perception:

• Work interactively with Questionmark experts
• Discover how easy it is to author questions
• Explore blended delivery options
• Find out about analytics and reporting
• Try out Questionmark Live browser-based authoring
• Experience assessments delivered on mobile devices
• Learn about translation management
• Enjoy a complimentary breakfast
  

After each briefing there will be a Questionmark User Group meeting and lunch for people who are already using Perception. These meetings offer an excellent opportunity to learn about new product features and to share your views with Questionmark management.

There is no charge for attending these events, which will take place between September 1 and October 22 in Boston, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Check the schedule and register soon. Space is limited.

Questionmark Live is available free of charge to Questionmark support plan customers, but anyone who wishes to may request a free 30-day trial.

Learn More about Questionmark Live
Access Questionmark Live or Request a 30-day Trial

As more organizations opt for the ease and flexibility of on-demand assessments and other hosted solutions, Questionmark is now offering technical support for urgent issues that arise outside of normal support hours. Expert support staff are available to help diagnose and solve problems even outside of office hours. This will be particularly helpful to global organizations delivering assessments worldwide.  To learn more about optional 24/7 support option, contact your account manager or customercare@questionmark.com.  

This new web-based authoring tool makes it easy for subject matter experts all over the world to create questions, provide choice-based feedback and even add images and links to questions. Authors can create an unlimited number of questions in five commonly-used formats. No training is needed, and there is no software to download. SMEs can be up and running on Questionmark Live in a matter of minutes, producing content for import into Questionmark Perception.

Using Questionmark Live, authors can:

• establish question sets focusing on a similar theme, subject or purpose
• create questions by following simple prompts
• add feedback if they wish
• add comment boxes to questions
• export or email their question set as a QPack
  

There is no limit to the number of authors who can use this tool, which is currently available in English, Dutch, German, French and Spanish. New features and functionality will be added in the coming months. Questionmark Live is a global solution, accessible to SMEs the world over!


Learn More about Questionmark Live

Access Questionmark Live or Request a 30-day Trial

View a Tutorial

We have always believed in promoting best practices in assessment and enjoy lively dialog about the important role assessments play in measuring learning and improving performance. The blog gives us yet another way to keep the conversation going!

Bookmark http://blog.questionmark.com and visit often - or sign up to get blog updates via RSS or email. Stay connected with us and with the wider testing and assessment community. Ask questions, post comments and take the opportunity to spark discussions. See you on the blog!

NORWALK, CT – March 31, 2009 – A newly released white paper from assessment technologies and services provider Questionmark takes a fresh look at ways to keep tests secure.

“Delivering Assessments Safely and Securely” explains how matching security measures to the stakes of an assessment can provide appropriate protection at reasonable cost. Over-engineering low-stakes assessments can waste money and time, while under-engineering high-stakes assessments can undermine people’s confidence in the validity of the results. So the paper suggests different security solutions and testing environments for a wide spectrum of assessments, from low-stakes satisfaction surveys to high-stakes licensure exams. It is available for free download from the Questionmark website.

“So many technologies and standards have changed since we first published this paper six years ago,” remarked Questionmark CEO Eric Shepherd. “Back then we did not worry about people using their phones to text, or photograph content, nor were there so many ways to deliver quizzes, tests and exams. We used to think that testing centers were the only way to go to deliver high stakes tests - how 90s! The updated paper takes into account these and other developments—like the increased use of bandwidth-intensive content such as video.“

About Questionmark:
Questionmark provides technologies and services that enable organizations to measure knowledge, skills and attitudes securely for certification, regulatory compliance and improved learning outcomes. Questionmark solutions enable reliable, valid and defensible assessments by empowering subject matter experts through collaborative authoring, accommodating participant needs with blended and multilingual delivery and informing stakeholders through timely reporting and meaningful analytics.

The Questionmark Perception assessment management system, available as a licensed, hosted or subscription-based solution, enables organizations to create, administer and report on surveys, quizzes, tests and exams. Complete details are available at www.questionmark.com.

Meta tags allow you to index and select questions according to their level of difficulty, approval status, and other distinguishing features
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The basic method for organising your questions in a Questionmark Perception repository is by topic. Questions are stored in topic and sub-topic folders. For example, if you have a group of questions on geography, you might have a topic folder called “World Geography”, and subtopic folders for “Europe,” “Asia,” “North America”, and so on.

If you need to further classify the geography questions in your topics, you can assign meta tags to them. Meta tags allow you to assign values to each question so that you can select questions that fulfill the purpose of a particular assessment.

Why might you want to assign meta tags to questions?

• To link questions to skills: The most useful meta tag is likely to be one that links the question to the job content analysis or a competency list.
• To keep assessments up to date: To ensure that your assessments are the most relevant or current, you can assign a meta tag value for an assessment version, for example v.1, v.2.
• To tailor assessments for different locations: If you foresee that assessments may need to be tailored to different locations (for example if the Milan location needs different questions than the San Francisco location), you can assign a meta tag value to determine where the assessment items will be drawn from.

To classify questions by difficulty, you can assign meta tag values that reflect the difficulty of each item. Difficulty values are important if you are trying to design an assessment that will spread out the participant scores. For such tests, the majority of your questions will likely fall in a “moderate” range. To make an assessment more sensitive, you can refine your difficulty categories by using data from previous test results, for example information given in an Item Analysis Report generated with Enterprise Reporter.

You can define as many different meta tags as you want, and each can have as many different values as you need.

View a step-by-step tutorial - Creating a Meta Tag and Assigning it to a Question

Once you have assigned meta tags to your questions, you can create an assessment (or edit an existing assessment) to select questions according to meta tag values. For details, see the following documentation on selecting questions for an assessment.

In Questionmark Perception, survey report templates are built up from individual reportlets, which contain the settings defining report content, style and settings. The settings within individual reportlets can be changed, and reportlets can be added to or removed from a template.

When creating a Survey Report you can: 

• Use a template 'as-is' by clicking on a template in the list provided 
• Use an amended template by clicking on a template in the list and then clicking Edit 
• Create a new template by clicking <create a new template> (at the bottom of the list)

Existing Survey Reports can be modified by amending the template, designating reportlets to be included in the revised report and choosing the contents for each reportlet.

The following links provide more details. The Survey Report Feature Tours provides step-by-step instructions for building Survey Reports, and the Knowledge Base article provides further details for Questionmark Software Support Plan customers.

Questionmark Knowledge Base: Functionality in the Survey Report