Assessment Tools
For science 10 online, formative assessment is an important part of the learning strategy. I decided to use an auto-graded quiz as part of my educational plan. This will give students instant feedback so that they may assess their own learning (Gibbs and Simpson, 2005). Each section of the course will be followed by such a quiz. This is built on Gibbs and Simpson’s (2005) notion that frequent testing will also distribute effort over an entire course. This quiz is a part of the chemistry and radiation unit. Students generally find this to be a challenging unit so it is important that they are getting as much feedback as possible. Summative assessment will be left in large part to face to face testing and other assignments. This quiz focuses on student-content and student-teacher interactions (Anderson, 2008). In large part, the teacher interaction with students is achieved instantaneously during the quiz as feedback which is pre-programmed into the multiple choice and short answer questions (and to a more limited extent in the essay questions).
Setting up the moodle quiz was not a difficult task. This was likely because I have had some experience creating quizzes in moodle. The quiz that I developed has three multiple choice, four matching, 2 short answer, and 2 short essay questions for a total of 15 marks. Timing was set for 25 minutes; it was pre-programmed for student feedback; and two questions had embedded images. All of this was per the ETEC 565 instructions for this activity. Since this is a formative quiz, I allowed for unlimited attempts and the quiz time was set to give students plenty of time to digest the question (and investigate the answer). To mark unlimited test attempts with 2 essay questions would be the most demanding part of this quiz. My personal opinion regarding this is that I do not want to rely solely on auto-graded quizzes. I believe that there will be more student-teacher interaction and discussion with more open-ended questions.
After constructing the quiz I previewed it in the student role. When I created the quiz I found one hindrance with the multiple choice questions. I could not write subscripts or superscripts in the answer box as there was no wysiwyg editor in the answer box and pasting it into the box did not work (nor could I work with the html). I had to put the answers for this multiple choice question in the question text box and simply put A,B,C, and D in the answer boxes (See Fig. 1 below). It looks a little clumsy, but I believe that it is effective. The short answer questions have the greatest potential to confuse and frustrate students. Students must write the exact answer that the instructor inputted into the quiz and even if the answer they input is a slight variance of the correct one, it will be marked incorrect (unless the instructor was successful in putting every possible variation into the quiz). For this reason, I see myself not using short answer questions in a real life situation. There was also a problem with my second short essay question. The wysiwyg editor appeared for the first short essay question, but not for the second one. The use of subscript and superscript editing is absolutely necessary for this question so in the absence of the editor problems will arise. The feedback for each question was as specific as possible. This follows Gibbs and Simpson’s (2005) line of thinking that “feedback must be quite specific to be useful.” This quiz should be easy for students to use.
Gibbs and Simpson’s (2005) Criteria of good feedback which I employed:
- correct errors
- develop understanding through explanations
- generate more learning by suggesting further specific study tasks
- promote the development of generic skills by focusing on evidence of the use of skills rather than on the content
- promote meta-cognition by encouraging students’ reflection and awareness of learning processes involved in the assignment encourage students to continue studying.
Grading in moodle is both sweet and sour. Being able to penalize students for incorrect responses is a useful option to have. For my quiz I elected to not penalize incorrect answers, although I believe now that it might have been a good idea to penalize students as it would make them think before responding. To have your quizzes automatically graded is a good thing, but when the essay sections can’t be graded it skews the final quiz mark. Students may not realize that the essay questions need to be marked by hand so this must also be factored into the quiz. Grades book is well organized. You can see all the students’ responses simply by clicking on the links to the questions (See Fig. 1 below). This is important in case you need to override a response.
Figure 1
Moodle is not perfect and it appears clumsy at times, but it offers tools to meet the needs of most teachers. Furthermore, students will feel the benefits of online test taking. Students that take online quizzes with computer-based feedback score much better on exams than stronger students that don’t (Gibbs and Simpson, 2005). In light of this, no matter whether it is for the purposes of formative or summative assessment, online quizzes are a good part of a successful teaching strategy.
References
Anderson, T. (2008). Towards a theory of online learning. In: Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Athabasca University. Accessed Online 9, June, 2009, from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/14_Anderson_2008_Anderson-Online_Learning.pdf
Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. Accessed Online 22, June, 2009, from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf
Adam Rattray