Multimedia Item Type Design for Assessing Human Cognitive Skills

Multimedia content has been used in education applications, e.g. in distance learning, to make learning more intuitive, more interactive and more effective than the traditional presentation formats. Although image, audio, video, graphics, animation and 3D representation can be found in current multimedia implementations, they are designed mainly for learning and not for testing. Most educational tests rely on simple, text-based items (e.g. multiple-choice questions), which focus on assessing a student´s knowledge rather than on evaluating the student´s cognitive skills and problem-solving abilities. In this paper, we propose a novel design that uses innovative test item types enriched with multimedia content, for evaluating a student´s cognitive skills including linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal.