“Conditions Under Which Assessment Supports Students’ Learning” by Graham Gibbs & Claire Simpson suggests many guidelines for educators to consider when creating assessments to monitor students’ progress in learning.
To follow these suggestions while creating the quiz in Moodle to assess student’s knowledge in my choice subject (English 12), is a challenge. However, when creating the exam, it was very familiar to the midterms I used to create for my students – multiple choice questions, short paragraphs, and essays. The only trouble I had was creating the matching and short answer questions. I was not familiar with what the questions or answers should look like, and had to test run a few questions for the look and feel of the exam.
For the quiz, I chose a poem from one of the textbooks, Echoes 12, and created a PDF version to post online. In order to follow the online BC English 12 Provincial Exam, I tried to have the PDF version available to students while taking the exam.
Problem with my Moodle skills:
I am still trying to find a way to open the file as a separate frame in the same Window… similar to the exam.
Next, the multiple choices – I tried to choose a variety of questions. Some tested for students’ ability to recognize patterns or literary devices in the poem. These are the basic, surface knowledge of poetry. Next, I tested for understanding of the written work – the speaker’s tone and attitude revealed through the poem.
Eventually, in the paragraph format, I assessed the students’ ability to relate to the poem personally, expressing their knowledge of the poem’s content to the real world.
Finally, the last essay is a general theme statement of the overall quiz, and allows the students the freedom to write freely on a given topic – with the previous questions and readings to help brainstorm some ideas.
Although English is often seen as subjective, the rubric for written work is quite straightforward. All my students will have reviewed and practiced self- and peer-evaluating their work using the criteria for the written work.
Feedback:
I have added automatic marking and immediate feedback, so that when students submit their answers, they will receive their mark and a brief explanation why their answer was correct or incorrect. Therefore, this quiz should function more as a review or practice of the “real thing” – but hopefully generate some learning during the process.
If time allows, I would also like to have a mini-webquest for the students, requesting students to interact with their reading material to become more familiar with the different styles of their readings. I would like the feedback to prompt students to develop their thinking instead of confirming if their answer was “correct” or “incorrect”. This will be done later.
Challenge:
As previously mentioned, I have trouble using the matching and the short answers as questions. These forms are difficult to provide immediate feedback, and difficult to mark automatically. I would prefer marking these separately, especially for subjects like English, where there is no exact answer (as opposed to a correct number or vocabulary). For future tests, I will probably only use these two methods to activate prior knowledge of the subject at hand to prompt them in answering the next few questions.
What I Like About Moodle:
Overall, I think this is a great way to help students engage with their reading material and perhaps, in the future, I will have students generating online quizzes for their peers – as a method to review the content they learned in class.