Abstract
The growth of the Internet, and in particular the World Wide Web, is already influencing the way
science is taught and will undoubtedly do so to greater extent in the future. One important facet of this is
the development of web-based assessment and testing systems. These systems also provides a valuable
new tool to the Education Research community; a tool that combines the ability of multiple-choice
diagnostic tests to handle large numbers of subjects with some of the greater flexibility and additional
information that other methods offer. On the other hand, some of the particular strengths of this tool also
give rise to some unique disadvantages. In this paper the strengths and weaknesses for education research
are discussed, and some suggestions for its use are presented.