Reflection

My experience creating quizzes in Moodle was made much easier by the fact that it is so easy to switch between creation mode and student view mode. The ability of the creator to select from a variety of question formats makes it easy to make a well balanced test and many of those formats have automatic grading built in giving the teacher more time to focus on providing feedback for short essay questions. As I noted in my rationale, programming meaningful feedback is difficult as feedback should tell students “exactly where they have gone wrong and what they can do about it” (Gibbs and Simpson, 2004, p. 18). I spent a lot of time contemplating how much feedback should be programmed. While it initially seemed like a good idea (since the option was there) to automatically program feedback for all of the questions, I decided against doing this in the interest of provide individualized, quality feedback to students in response to the answers on their summative test.

According to Gibbs and Simpson (2004), “students need to understand criteria in order to orient themselves appropriately to the assignment task” (p.20). Upon reflecting on this, I edited the criteria for most of the assignments I created before completing the assessment tools assignments in order to provide more details. I even had grade 7 students from my school read the criteria and tell me what their impression of it was.

One of the strengths of my formative quiz is the ability afforded by Moodle to allow me to program feedback that guides students towards what they should include in their answer. Since the quiz will allow students to see which multiple choice, short answer and matching questions they got right immediately, I wanted to include an option that would allow for automatic feedback to be provided for short essay questions but without having to go through all of the students responses myself. For question #10 on the quiz, I programmed feedback that gives students immediate reminders about what elements should be included in their answer. This allows students to compare their work and self-monitor their own answers. Additionally, question #11 of the quiz provides students with several examples of questions that may be asked on the summative test so that they can reflect on whether or not their understanding is where it needs to be.

Overall, I focused on the quiz/test assessment options for this assignment. I have many other assessments designed and as a result of doing this assignment, I did adjust criteria in order to adhere to some of the recommendations by Gibbs and Simpson (2004).

References:

Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005).  “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Accessed online June 24, 2009 http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf