CD-ROM. Mindtrail v4.1

CD-ROM

Mindtrail v4.1

Mindtrail Software, PC Box 93, Indooroopilly, Q4068Australia2001AUS$249

Reducing the amount of time spent marking student assignments while increasing the quality of feedback given might sound like incompatible goals,but the Mindtrail CD-ROM goes some way in helping to achieve them. The assessment package can help teachers and lecturers to save and reuse their own subject-specific assessment knowledge and feedback in a checklist style that instantly builds detailed and focused feedback reports for students. The tool can therefore help both the individual teacher or lecturer who is tired of handwriting the same feedback to many students, and the team of markers looking to increase consistency of feedback to students.

The CD-ROM can help academics to give their students detailed reports on how their assignments were assessed. This can include what the student did correctly or incorrectly, and how he or she could improve. The academic can then include illustrative examples, solutions and further reading, at the click of a mouse. The tool, developed by academics at Australia's Griffith University, can also facilitate tracking student and class performance. The software's response profiling allows an assessor to see the areas in which students are having problems. By assigning scores to student feedback, Mindtrail automatically grades assessments as you go. Reviewing, moderating or regrading a class can therefore be achieved simply by typing a score once.

The original version of Mindtrail was launched in Australia in 1999. Based on feedback received from Australian customers, Mindtrail v4.1 appeared in February. This allows users to copy and paste works between question sets,workbooks and projects. New assessments can therefore be created by copying and pasting common elements of assessments from the templates directory, from old projects or from colleagues' projects. A new assessment-merge feature enables different assessors to take away the same project and then merge them back into the same Mindtrail database. This can help external markers, people providing distance education or those marking groups of more than one. More than one Mindtrail application can be run simultaneously on the same machine. This helps with copying between projects or marking more than one assignment at the same time. A number of tools help new users to get their bearings. The Quick Tour provides a brief understanding, while selecting "Tutorial" under the"Help" menu furnishes a good working understanding of the tool and how to use it. There are a number of different templates that give examples of different ways of using the CD-ROM.