Adventures in MET Land

Assessment Tools reflection.

A laboratory safety quiz was created for the Moodle based Chemistry 11 course. A safety activity was created within the Moodle environment for the last unit activity (module 3 unit 2, communication activity); thus, it seemed organic (like the chemistry lingo) to create a quiz on the safety activity material.

Eight questions were created within the test building program Examview and two questions were created within the Moodle question building environment. This was done by accident. I assumed that eight questions would give me the required 15 mark quiz; however, after reading the instructions I realized that 10 questions were required. Although this was a mistake, it allowed me to compare building questions in the two different environments.

Questions were not pulled from the test program, since test program questions banks were for junior science grades. Creation of questions within both environments was easy; however, exporting questions from Examview requires the user to export the questions to a blackboard format. The created data file within the zipped blackboard formatted questions folder is than important into Moodle. It was not possible to import images; thus, images must be separately uploaded. Other issues of importing questions were: question feedback was not always imported, Moodle interpreted the short answer questions from Examview as essay questions, and not all of the matching questions word options were imported.

Typing of questions within the Moodle question environment proved to be less time consuming than creating questions within Examview and than exporting/importing them into Moodle. From my experience I would make two suggestions:

1. Creating questions from scratch: create the questions within the Moodle question environment.
2. Selecting pre-created questions from Examview: create your quiz within Examview and export/import questions into Moodle.

These suggestions are based on saving the instructor time. The second option will require the instructor to fix importing errors; however, fixing these errors would require less time than retyping of the question within Moodle. In both cases, questions should be created/imported into unique question categories.

Creation of the actual quiz was straight forward once the questions were finalized and placed within a unique quiz question category. The only frustration came upon submitting questions during the testing of the quiz. An incorrect/correct message would appear upon hitting submit. To prevent this from occurring, adaptive mode must be turned off.

A second quiz was created for ETEC’s 565 module 3 unit 3′s activity. For this activity a 6 question 18 mark quiz was created for the peer evaluation of an assignment created within the Moodle based Chemistry 11 course. About an hour was required from start to finish to create the quiz. The rubric style questions allowed answers to be used as percentages of the total mark of the question; thus, the total sum of the quiz equals the peer evaluated mark of another group’s assignment.

Working within Moodle’s quiz environment has been an interesting and worthwhile experience. I have learnt that an investment in time is required to learn how to build quizzes within Moodle. Once the learning has occurred, quizzes do not take much time to create. I have also learnt that quizzes within these environments provide immediate feedback to students upon quiz completion. Jenkins (2004), Gibbs and Simpson (2004) noted the importance of immediate feedback in students learning process. For this reason I believe that computer assisted quizzes are a great tool in helping student self assess their learning and for instructors to formatively assess them. However, I do not believe that these quizzes should ever be used for summative assessment.

I will probably never accept performance based marks from computer assisted quizzes. Students will be tempted to cheat during these quizzes. Moreover, students can take pictures with cameras or write down the answers and email them to fellow students who have not taken the quiz. Withholding answers until the class has completed the quiz is a Moodle quiz option; however, by doing this you are preventing students from receiving immediate timely feedback. Some sort of mark motivator will be required to have students partake in these educational significant activities.

I believe that I will use computer assisted quizzes in the future for students to formatively assess their content knowledge. I will include all types of questions with formative feedback. I will not mark the essay questions, but students will be able to compare their answers to my answer upon quiz completion.

Cheers,

Dale

References:

Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005).  “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

Jenkins, M. (2004).  “Unfulfilled Promise: formative assessment using computer-aided assessment.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education , i, 67-80.