Assessment Tools

The Module 1 Quiz I set up in WebCT Vista is meant for formative assessment. Although my learning modules remain under construction since I do not have pre-existing content to draw from, I had to develop and produce questions for the quiz that I thought would be relevant to the content I will be placing in WebCT. While it would have been easier to create mock questions, I purposely created questions to see what the experience would be like in a situation where I would have to develop questions in a working environment. If I had to choose other means of assessment, I would prefer to use coursework assignments since they seem more appropriate for the type of course I am developing and are better in predicting the effectiveness of course content in the long term (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005).

As per the assignment specifications, the Module 1 Quiz contains three multiple choice questions, three matching questions, two short answer and two short essay questions. I estimate that the quiz would take no longer than one hour and set the assessment time for that period. As well, the quiz was set to start June 26, 2009 at noon with the end date of August 31, 2009 at noon. I would have set the end date on the same day to give learners only one chance for the assessment but left it at the end of August in case there are any accessibility issues and others in the class would like to view it.

I actually had some fun implementing this quiz rather than coming up with the questions for it. In the two hours or so I spent creating the quiz, I would say most of my time went to experimenting with the options and clicking on the preview button to see what difference each option made. This was the best way for me to understand what each option meant.

The One Shot Deal
The quiz is set for one attempt and that is indeed all the Student View in Vista affords. Although it is nice to know that the one attempt works, it would be better to have an option to reset the Student View after finding out it functions so any other changes in the quiz could be tested. Perhaps builders and teachers would benefit from a mock student view and a real student view but that could complicate things in Vista. I’m not sure if my “brief” two hours of experimenting was enough or if I need more time to make that discovery.

Multiple Choice
This question type took the most experimentation since the multiple choice assessment had multiple options. For this, I played around with the one answer/multiple choice answers and all or nothing. During this time, I believe I tried to re-use a quiz title and found out I was not allowed to do so. Makes me wonder how to view those titles so I can delete them – something to look into further.

Short Answers
Choosing “contains”, as in contains the word, for multiple words can result in over- or under- scoring, which I think is absolutely pointless. If a question has four possible answers at a value of 25% each and students are somehow able to place five possible correct answers in one box, it makes no sense to give them more than full marks.

Providing Feedback
Gibbs and Simpson (2005) list steps to engage students with feedback and the impact feedback may have, such as providing feedback but no marks and how the student acts upon feedback. In this quiz, I made sure to provide feedback on most of the responses, whether or not the answers were correct, incorrect or if there was another possibility. Other feedback provided concise explanations and encouraged the student to refer to module content for more information or to review a particular section to help them understand more about the question. For students to review certain modules, I think it is important again to include coursework assessments that help them build on their work from previous modules so they can thoroughly develop an understanding of the content presented in each unit. Forum discussions amongst their peers may also help cement their knowledge of concepts and ideas.

In the future, I would like to further examine quiz creation in Moodle to compare the differences between both LMS platforms. Are there some elements that make more sense or are easier to implement than others? Definitely something to investigate.

Reference

Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1, 3-31. Retrieved June 26, 2009 from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf