My intention for the quiz about the student handbook was to build a scaffold for students in my grade 4/5 class so that they could consider the importance of knowing what expected behaviour is in our school. Our staff had some trouble with behaviour at the primary level this year, and we will be developing a plan to make our behaviour interventions more cohesive and consistent this August during our school-based pro-d days. Understanding the school core values and code of conduct is an expectation for all students in the school. The goal is for students to have a very clear understanding of what is expected of them, as we have a strong belief at our school that students cannot demonstrate what they have not been taught. Teaching pro-social behaviour eliminates intervention needs for the majority of students. For me, it doesn’t matter necessarily that students understand this immediately. As a student myself, having only one shot at something has left me feeling frustrated and disappointed in myself for missing details, such as certain criteria expectations. In an assessment for learning classroom, students are given more than one chance in many instances. As mastery of the expectations is important for students, I opened up the quiz for unlimited attempts. My belief is that students who care about doing their best will take advantage of that, and that those students will become the models for others. In this way students who do not choose to repeat the quiz still benefit. In a constructivist classroom, students will learn when they are ready to do so. I fully expect some of the students are not ready or motivated to learn. They will be allowed to retake the quiz at the end of the unit to improve their grade. Time limits are set on the test so that students cannot simply open the handbook up and copy and paste the answers directly into the quiz. They need to go back and re-read the information. I have provided page numbers so that students don’t waste time scrolling for information.
Derek Rowntree, (as cited in Gibbs and Simpson, 2005, p. 4) who states that “if we wish to discover the truth about an educational system, we must first look to its assessment procedures” hits the nail on the head. I am always asking myself if I am assessing what I want to be learned. Using a quiz is not the best way perhaps to perform every assessment, but when you simply wish students to review material for further application, it can be very effective. The assessment would allow me to zone in on students who don’t necessarily understand our expectations, freeing up time to manage behaviours that students know full well are not expected, or to find out what the underlying reason for students willfully ignoring or being unable to follow expectations is. The majority of students will know, understand and follow expectations without prompting. The less time spent on classroom management, the more time there is to learn academic content and do fun applications of learning, such as science labs.
The feedback I have built into the quiz allows me to reinforce the behavioural expectations once again. Gibbs and Simpson define feedback as essential to learning. I have also tried to satisfy other conditions for effective feedback outlines, such as sufficient assessed tasks (the criteria expectations took care of this for me), immediate feedback offered for some questions, basing the feedback on the purpose of the assignment, outlined above, two stage assignments (allowing multiple attempts), encouraging students to try again if they are incorrect. This quiz can be used for diagnostic purposes by telling me how well they understand the handbook as a group so that I can decide what behaviours require practice, for formative purposes (getting feedback and repeating the quiz) and for summative purposes (final attempt kept as grade).
Using the Moodle assessment tool was an interesting experience. As a novice computer user, I found the quiz tool to be fairly easy to use. I was grateful not to have to write code. The biggest frustration for me was the wait times for the pages to load. I also had to watch many tutorials about aspects of the quizzes that I wasn’t sure about, such as default marks, auto-assessment of marks and pre-programmed exam feedback. I wasn’t sure if these would happen as a consequence of question design or if I was supposed to intentionally set them up. When I first entered my matching questions I realized that each matching question included all of the matches students made, rather than each match counting as a question. This made the test quite long for my age group: grade 4. Many of my students do not yet know how to write essays, and I normally would only expect them to do so at the end of the year.
I liked the question marks which helped me to define labels on the pages. Those were helpful. It took me a while to find the role switching at the bottom of the administration navigation, and the first time I wanted to see what the test looked like, I tried it out as a student. This caused the test to be shut down for further questions. I wasn’t sure what to do then, so I googled it and someone had an answer for me, thank goodness. Good old Google.
Areas for further attention:
I am not sure how to build self-assessment into this tool. I would like to spend more time investigating if it is an option, and how you use if for grading. I don’t really like how teachers ask students to self-assess and then they assess the same piece of work beside the student assessment. If you are going to allow students to self assess, it doesn’t seem right to then tell them that they are wrong, and you are the final authority, because perception is reality. I have found self-assessment to be very accurate, if anything I have to bump up some marks as students tend to be very critical of their own work. In any case there is a conversation that is required, not simply and overlay of teacher grading.
I’m not sure I like the short answer questions, much like others whose blogs I have read. The program is simply not smart enough to determine if the answer approximates the correct response. I only used the sort answer questions for sections that were direct quotes. Asking students for direct quotes is not evidence that they have learned anything, and I usually prefer students to answer in their own words.
What intrigues me most about assessment was Gibbs and Simpsons assertion that peer assessment is very effective, and the work does not require grading. I like this because it encourages students to consider their best effort according to their peers, whose opinion they care deeply about, in my experience. As long as peers understand the criteria explicitly and can explain them to me, I can rely on their judgment.
As far as using Moodle in my classroom, I’m sitting on the fence at the moment. As a teacher who still uses technology as best resource for many tasks, I am not entirely sold on a completely online course. Firstly, I did not have the content developed for my Moodle, so I had to develop it while making the quiz, so that took me significantly longer than I expected. For my age group (grade 4/5) I’m not sure the time investment is worth it. Most of my students attend every day, and using the page as an adjunct to classwork wouldn’t really be justified. Plus we only have one lab in the school and if I was to devote my lab blocks (2 45 minute blocks per week) to the moodle, there would be time for little else. I might complete the course after my own course is finished and give it a try this fall. Maybe most of the time will be front-end loaded and I can enjoy helping individual students. We’ll see. I’m glad for the opportunity to play around with the features, but I think unless you have very good access to a lab or laptops or teach high school, you might be better off developing a great course outside of Moodle that takes advantage of the internet as a resource, not a learning management system.
References:
- Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C., (2004). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education,vol. 1, no. 1 . Retrieved from: http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf
- Government of British Columbia, (2009). Classroom Assessment and Student Reporting. Retrieved from http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/classroom_assessment/
- Rowntree, D. (1987) Assessing Students — how shall we know them? London. Kogan Page.
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