Boris’s idea for an online self-assessment tool is a good one — students usually like these self-test devices, and the right questions could be a strong bridge between labwork and examinations.
But Boris’s need for two kinds of feedback – instant and formative – raises interesting questions. Can the same self-assessment tool do both? Is formative feedback implicit in instant feedback anyway – or, rather, implicit enough for high school students to be able to infer where they need to increase their studies.
Any Web-enabled “machine” self-assessment tool should be able to do this, at least in a crude fashion. Get a question wrong on krypton, and the machine response to that question tells you to study that specific part of the table of elements more closely. Some question-authoring software should allow the instructor to program formative feedback based on the student’s total score, drawing broad areas of deficient understanding to the student’s attention and suggesting how s/he can address those deficiencies with remedial study.