Assessment
I created a ten question (3 Matching, 3 Multiple choice, 2 Short answer, and 2 Essay questions) quiz in Module 3 of my Moodle site . At first I created the matching and multiple choice questions using the Hot Potatoes Quiz maker – this is not mine – and importing it into Moodle. I realized, however, that for the purpose of the assignment questions needed to be created in Moodle, so I corrected my mistake. I was happy for the experience and found both ways to be equally user-friendly.
Creating the questions was in fact the easy part. Deciding on how much time to allot, what feedback to give and where (general or individual answer), and how to make this quiz work best for students was another matter. Allowing too much time might lead to cheating (surfing the net, looking up answers in a textbook, etc.) but making it too short would be frustrating for students and would not allow for a fully developed answer for the essay questions. So, I decided on 45 minutes for a time limit. As for the feedback, Gibbs and Simpson (2005) explain the value of feedback and that it should be timely. Taking this into consideration, I built feedback into the answers and allowed for students to view their attempt as soon as it is submitted. I thought it was particularly important to provide details of the correct answer if a student chose the wrong answer and a comment (e.g. Good work!) for those who got it right. I also provided feedback for students’ overall performance with a comment that their mark may go up after the essay questions are marked since I could not figure out how to get the system to auto-mark these. However, what I did do was provide feedback with a few sentences of what should be included in the essay questions. I thought this was important for learning and also would give students a better idea of what their final mark might be. For one of the essay questions I provided a PDF of an article and chose to have it “open in the same window” but was a bit concerned that after reading it, students may accidentally close the entire quiz – something to think about. I decided against providing it as a link to a website because I know with the browser security that I use at my college accessing the Internet while completing a test is not permitted.
Typically being a procrastinator, I was pleased with myself for beginning this assignment well ahead of the due date (Thank you for the prompt John) because I was then able to spend a significant amount of time trouble-shooting. At first I had set the quiz to submit questions individually but after trying the quiz myself I found it to be distracting and I had a problem with it marking correctly. It seemed to allow multiple attempts despite my best effort to prevent it. I think this would be a good feature for non-graded assessments but not so for a graded one such as this.
Although my assessment was set up to be marked because reality is students need a grade at the end of most courses, Gibbs and Simpson (2005) describe the positive impact that ‘practice tests’ have on student performance on later graded tests. Thinking about this, I plan on populating my Moodle site (and my ‘real’courses) with several “quizzes for learning.” The other change I will be making in my own practice is adding a lot more useful and directed feedback to my online quizzes – marked or not!
Reference
Gibbs, G. & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31.