Online Assessment in Language Teaching Environment through Essays, Oral Discussion, and Multiple-Choice Questions

Abstract

Assessment has always played an essential role in any kind of education, including foreign language teaching, as it provides feedback to the students, enables reporting, and ensures progress development. Still, it can also be the cause of various forms of anxiety and stress. In the era of digital learning when basically all teaching processes can be conducted online, assessment can prove to be a major challenge for instructors. The research was conducted with two groups of students to evaluate whether multiple-choice questions or essay writing questions create any major advantage or disadvantage for the student's cognitive development and learning strategies. The results clearly show that there are differences between the two groups. The experimental group that was tested by using essays for their evaluation reached better results in their final oral exam, while the control group that was tested by only using multiple-choice tests reached better results in their interim evaluation, but they showed only lower levels of cognitive skills. The results show that to improve cognitive and oral competencies, it is more efficient to assess the students with written essays via weekly quizzes in addition to oral discussion tests rather than just fill-in-the-form tests despite the fact that these tests are able to generate better results in the students’ formative exams.