Feature Briefs
Activity Event Log
About
Assessment organization staff have a considerable task of developing their examinations given the many steps and components of the workflow process. As a result, it is not only important that a system contains features to assist with completing each item development task plus keep track of it all, but the system should also be reliable, and enhance efficiency and quality control. Recording and cataloging all workflow user activities ensures that all relevant parties know the steps that have occurred. The Pro! Activity Event Log proves an asset in this process and serves as an electronic fingerprint of “Who, What, When, and Where”.
Bulk Update
About
Credentialing organizations must frequently make the same change to a group of items. When it is possible to open and modify each item, this can be labor intensive and subject to human error.
Bulk Update is an alternative to changing items one by one. The update is faster overall and has no chance of updating an item differently. A bulk update consists of two parts: the bulk update specification and the list of items to update.
Classifications
About
Item classification is traditionally represented by a hierarchical structure similar to an org chart in which nodes are above, at the same level as, or below another, Each node in the hierarchy is numbered. A node path, which is formed by concatenating the number of each node that must be visited in order to reach the destination node, identifies a node’s location in the tree. For example, in the illustration below the node path 001.002.001 forms the address of History->EurHistory->Medieval. An item is classified when a node path is assigned to the item.
Exhibit Management
About
Tests include pictures and other media more frequently than in the past. Often an item contains two or more media components, and the components may appear in the stimulus, stem, answer choices, or all three. These media components create issues for item banking systems. Pro! is designed to seamlessly manage media and offers an integrated digital asset management system workflow.
Item Approval Workflow
About
Every credentialing organization has a business process to ready new items for pretesting. Strasz calls this business process Item Approval Workflow. The business process varies by organization, but the essentials are similar. Newly written items, that may or may not have been committee reviewed, are added as part of the input process. The new items may have been created in Pro!’s Remote Item Authoring module or imported from an item-authoring vendor. Items are made available for Pretesting as a result of the Item Approval Workflow process.
Item Search
About
Items are rich in data: keywords, creation date, status, classifications, approvals, last use, etc. Rich data demands an item search of equal richness, and Pro! has the most powerful in the industry.
Item Writing Rules
About
Assessment organizations typically have policies about the presence and placement of punctuation, characters, words, and phrases in an item. Requiring the stem to end with a question mark is a routine example. Communicating the rules to item writers and managing their adherence to the rules can be difficult. Pro! helps an assessment organization lower its item development costs through client definition and enforcement of rules that item writers cannot bypass.
Poolbooks
About
Working with lists of items is a daily part of a test development professional’s working life. The lists have many purposes and life spans, but at some point, all have outlived the purpose for which they were constructed. Sometimes, lists have an identity in the routine business processes of the assessment organization—for example, the list of operational items for the upcoming administration. While the content of that list changes from admin to admin, the list has an identity as an input to routine business processes. Other lists are ad hoc. They are created to serve some temporary purpose, and the list ceases to exist once it has served its purpose.
Pro! formalizes the handling of lists of items via its Poolbook feature. A Poolbook is an arbitrary list of items. An authorized user can create a Poolbook and populate it with items selected for the purpose the Poolbook will serve.
Pro! Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
About
Pro!™ is a powerful, mature, robust system for the development and management of items and tests. Pro! supports application program interfaces (API) which allows an organization to securely integrate Pro! into its ecosystem. Using a combination of the OAuth (Open Authorization) standard for authentication and authorization and OData (Open Data Protocol), an ISO/IEC approved standard for best practices, Pro!’s APIs are RESTful, robust and secure.
Publish!
About
Publish! is a revolutionary integration app that creates test delivery packages from any item writing tool for delivery in any channel. Think of Publish! as a railway roundhouse connecting content from any item bank to the test driver of any test delivery provider.