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One of the challenges facing contemporary higher education is the need to design and support authentic projects, relevant to the students in their current and expected contexts--as students and as novice professionals (Birenbaum & Dochy, 1996; Newmann & Archbald, 1992). These characteristics have also been related to project-based learning (e.g. Donnelly & Fitzmaurice, 2005; Lasonen & Vestrinen 2000; McGarth 2003; Morgan 1983). De Corte (2003) defines four main features of learning environments that intend to foster the productive use of knowledge and skills: "... initiate active and constructive learning processes in students, enhance students' cognitive and volitional self regulation, provide socio-cultural supports for learning through interaction & collaboration and finally, confronting students as much as possible with challenging, realistic, problems and situations that have personal meaning for them and are representative for the kind of tasks they will encounter in the future." However, creating authentic, competency-based projects, especially in the first years of higher education, presents a considerable challenge for course leaders, due to the students' novice state of knowledge and skills and the remoteness of the professional work-place context (true even for vocation-directed studies). One way we have addressed this challenge in the department of Instructional Systems Technologies is to design projects with products that are genuinely useful within the students' current organization--namely the academic context. Our students who are preparing for careers in Instructional Technologies and Organizational Training must acquire professional knowledge and skills enabling them to design questions for revision and assessment. In addition, contemporary education and training are increasingly taking place in technologically-enhanced environments that afford vastly greater interactivity and multi-tasking than previously afforded by print-based media. Thus, the project product must function effectively within such a platform. In this paper we shall describe a project of creating an interactive Self-Assessment Items' Repository (SAIR) for first year courses, and show that it satisfies the authenticity models offered by Newmann and Archbald (1992) and Gulikers, Bastiaens, and Kirschner, (2008), while fostering a community of learners. Instructional Design of the SAIR Project Although students frequently encounter assessment items on homework and examinations, they are rarely aware of the design and construction principles that have been employed to enable the items to serve specific purposes. Designing a self-assessment items' repository (SAIR) for first year courses covers a wide range of aspects, including target content and skills, levels of instructional objectives, response modes, presentation forms, interactivity, and feedback. In general, there are two assessment item formats: "constructed response" and "choice response". In the "constructed response" (also known as "open ended") format the student is required to generate an answer to a given question. In the "choice response" (CR) format the student is required to select one or more of a short list of answer options. Multiple choice (MC) items form a common example of the CR format (Birenbaum, Tatsuoka, & Gutvirtz, 1992). The SAIR was intended to contain a variety of CR format items. For students to succeed in the project it was necessary for course leaders to design a learning environment that would foster the productive use of acquired knowledge and skills (De Corte 2003). We have addressed this problem by implementing a 3-stage instructional sequence for our 2nd year students, based on the integration of skills and knowledge from two concurrent courses: "Measurement and Evaluation of Learning Achievement" (MEA) and "Interactive Learning Environments" (ILE). Following are the main stages of the instructional design: Stage 1 begins in the MEA course, where students learn about assessment item formats and principles of constructing a variety of CR format items. …

Designing a Self-Assessment Item Repository: An Authentic Project in Higher Education