Moodle Assessment Activity: “Assessing Your Writing Skills”
Rationale
In their 2004 article, “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning,” Gibbs and Simpson quote Chickering and Gamson (1987): “In getting started, students need help in assessing existing knowledge and competence” (p. 16).
I believe this is especially true of writing skills, particularly when students are expected to have a basic level of skill in grammar and punctuation at the outset (which is the case in my classes). To answer this need, I created a diagnostic quiz which is mostly self-assessed. The students receive feedback immediately for all questions except two (essay-type questions, which require instructor review).
In addition to allowing students and myself to ensure they are at an appropriate level for the course they are about to undertake, this quiz is useful for clarifying student expectations; they understand immediately the importance of have strong, basic writing skills.
Am I Really Measuring What I Think I’m Measuring?
One of the possible weaknesses of this quiz is that it may not measure students’ actual ability. Indeed, this is the purpose of the two essay questions: some students who cannot recognize parts of speech or explain why a comma belongs where it does, can nonetheless write with reasonable competence. In short, they may not know the rules, but they know how to employ them! A student who fails miserably on the eight technical questions but does well on the essays, may do just fine in the course (after all, this is not a course on grammar; students are asked to use it, not explain it).
As This Exercise Unfolded…
An interesting aspect of this exercise came in the form of the prescribed content of the quiz. While we were advised to evaluate the needs of the course content in terms of using the appropriate assessment, we were simultaneously told exactly what types of questions to include and also encouraged to use other features such as images and a time limit.
At first, I found this frustrating; how can we demonstrate our ability to choose the appropriate assessment when we’re not given a choice? Of course, I understand that part of the exercise (perhaps, in fact, the only purpose of the exercise) was to demonstrate our ability to actually use these tools in Moodle. Nonetheless, there seemed to be a contradiction there.
The end result really was interesting. For example: a time limit. Without this prescribed feature, I would not have thought to use it in this case. The quiz is informal and diagnostic, I rationalized, so why put time constraints on the students? Then I began to think this over; if the goal is to measure students’ current writing abilities, then they should, in fact, be discouraged from stopping to look something up and resuming the test later. This time limit, I’m now convinced, will help to discourage “studying.”
Assessing This Exercise
All in all, this was a productive exercise and I’ll be using an online diagnostic from now one; while I’ve been working with Moodle for quite some time, and have thought of this possibility, I’ve just never gotten around to giving it a try. I’m glad I had the opportunity here.
Technical Problem & Workaround
I noticed that for some reason the editing tools in the essay questions come and go seemingly at random (a couple other ETEC 565 students experienced this as well). I checked the forum at Moodle.org for a workaround and it turns out that this will occur if there is more than one essay question per page. So, I’ve turned off “shuffle questions” and made sure the two essay questions are on separate pages. Okay for this situation, but not the greatest overall…
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References
Gibbs, G. & Simpson, C. (2004). “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Accessed online 24 June 2010 http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf