Moodle Assessment – A positive challenge and experience

As an elementary school teacher, I find one of my greatest challenges to be creating authentic and meaningful learning experiences and their corresponding tasks, assignments and assessments. When teaching, I try to start with the end in mind and build backwards, but students’ abilities, interests and understanding often take me to places I hadn’t intended. To me, those teachable moments are incredibly valuable so I do my best to let them play themselves out rather than getting caught up in the need to complete a lesson right away. I also strive to give timely and constructive feedback to my students, as Gibbs & Simpson (2005) posit to being important to student learning. With this is mind, I relish the idea of exploring online testing opportunities which can provide students with immediate or timely feedback and positive reinforcement to their learning.

When it came to contemplating my task of creating a quiz using the Moodle LMS (learning management system) platform, I decided that I wanted to try to go in the other direction and build an assessment of a classroom unit that my own students had completed not long ago. As all parts of this particular unit were hands on and formative based, it would provide me with a possible mid-way quiz if I wanted to try this unit again. In the past, I have worked with Moodle quiz making tools. I remember only creating a handful of quizzes as I found creating exactly what I wanted in terms of questions and auto-grading, to be rather challenging and cumbersome. Now, five years later, I have the opportunity to explore Moodle again through different eyes.

As a person who enjoys ‘playing’ with computer programs, I was excited to revisit Moodles’ capabilities and set the challenge to myself to more thoroughly explore my options and the various types of questions available. Although it was a slow process to start with, I was able to navigate my way through, and managed to create a number of different questions. Below, I have listed the particular questions styles I used and some of my thoughts about them.

Multiple choice – Although I found several styles which could be worthwhile for elementary ages, I believe that the multiple choice style would suite my purposes best for those I teach.  They were the easiest to build and use, and would be the easiest for intermediate students to answer and demonstrate their learning. As the student progresses through the multiple choice quiz, they are afforded the ability to receive immediate feedback either indicating a correct/incorrect response, as well as a written comment if the teacher has placed a comment into the question feedback section.

Essay and short questions – Looking at how the essay and short answer questions are presented and graded, I believe I would also incorporate the occasional essay style question, but realize that many of my students struggle with the writing process, so would limit this usage. Essays need to be manually graded, but do allow for a greater depth of understanding and learning demonstration. The only question style that I truly struggled with was short answer as it was difficult to create an answer that the program would be able to grade. This prompted me to make the mental note to use essay style questions for any questions where I might have either a sentence or multiple answers.

Matching and True/False questions – Although I found both easy to create and use, the challenge for these particular questions is that I rarely use them in regular testing situations so creating this style of question had me exploring where and when I might be able to use them in the future. The biggest consideration for this style is the particular wording needed in order to offer a fair and suitable question.

One of the parts that I really like about Moodle with regards to the quizzes is that you can create the questions at your leisure, edit them as needed, then create and implement quizzes when students are ready for them. By having a quiz bank available, some questions may or may not be relevant for any given quiz or situation, but choosing and ordering the questions was fairly straight forward and easy to do.  I can also see potential for scaffolding between topics and subjects areas.

As with most technology, I found that I was also getting quicker and more accomplished with each creation attempt. I really liked being able to preview the quiz and then edit questions while in the preview mode. It felt like I had fewer steps to take to ensure questions are presented in the way I expect or could accept. Although I altered and played with the quiz settings as well as previewed the quiz I created, until I am able to watch a student progress through it, I can’t be positive that I love it, but at this point I can say that I’m happy with the results and realize that the quiz may go through several edits still.

Although a challenging task, I found this assignment to be informative and engaging. As an elementary school teacher, I feel that my options for creating online quizzes for my students are somewhat limited. However, with practice, patience and a bit of time investment in creating a bank of questions to draw from, utilizing Moodles’ quiz tools would prove to be valuable to both my students and myself.  My students would be able to receive immediate feedback to signify and reward their learning and I would be able to quickly and accurately assess what they have learned (their successes) and what learning they still require (their weaknesses).

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