Assessment

Assessment Reflection

I found the task of creating an online assessment tool to be one of the more challenging activities ETEC 565 has offered yet. I was surprised by both the depth and complexity of features Moodle has incorporated into its quiz creation tools. Initially, I had little working knowledge of the Moodle quiz tools. This assignment, however, increased my knowledge of Moodle and made me somewhat of a Moodle enthusiast.

Before starting, I naively thought that it would require very little effort to create and post my quiz onto the LMS. I realized quickly that this wasn’t going to be the case. One of the main reasons that I was having some difficulty at first was the numerous tools that Moodle provides for creating very powerful quizzes to compliment an online course. Although many users of Moodle would be thrilled and enthusiastic regarding these tools, I felt that the majority of these features would not be beneficial to my particular course. Nevertheless, I decided to do some exploring to see what Moodle could offer. I proceeded with some trepidation and the determination to master my Moodle skills.

For my own quiz, I used a variety of distinct questions that I thought would bolster and compliment students’ understanding and learning of the material they were presented with on my LMS. I found this process to be extremely challenging, if I was going to meet my goals. Nevertheless, I decided to include a mixture of different questions including true and false, short answer, multiple choice, essay and matching questions. At this point I was thankful for having the Gibbs and Simpson article at my disposal to help direct my assessment reasoning. What intrigued me the most about their article Conditions Under Which Assessment Supports Students’ Learning was their take on sufficient feedback. Was I providing my students with quick, reliable and supportive feedback that would help my students rather than hinder their learning? Gibbs and Simpson believe that, “if students do not receive feedback fast enough then they will have moved on to new content and the feedback is irrelevant to their ongoing studies and is extremely unlikely to result in additional appropriate learning activity, directed by the feedback (Gibbs and Simpson, pg. 19). An online quiz seems like the perfect tool in providing quick responsive feedback but I wondered how this would work with some of the essay questions that I provided in my quiz. Perhaps this was my lack of knowledge on using the tools within Moodle? In addition, would the feedback that I provided within my quiz help or hinder my students’ progression through the material? My concerns also pertained to the difficulty level of some of the concepts of the module in question. I wondered if I could have created an assessment tool that was slightly easier but still tested for understanding and critical thinking.

Although I enjoyed working with Moodle’s assessment tools, I believe it has some drawbacks. One of its drawbacks is the time required in creating the online assessment tool. As an intermediate elementary school teacher, lack of time is one of the biggest challenges that I face. Creating an online assessment requires an exorbitant amount of time, which many teachers may not be able to afford and I was quite surprised at the amount of time it took me to create the quiz. I believe that if I had used traditional methods it would have taken me less time to create the quiz. However, I believe that as I expand on my Moodle knowledge, these types of tools will become second nature and require less time. In addition, once the quiz has been made, I can easily reuse and make edits as needed.

During this assignment I also discovered many advantages to creating an online assessment tool. The ability to create a quiz that self-marks would definitely save the time spent marking. In addition, being able to embed comments within the quiz can not only save time but would provide students with quick and specific feedback about their learning. As Gibbs and Simpson state, “…feedback concerning content provides the students with options for action and is less closely associated with their ego – it is about their action rather than about themselves” (Gibbs and Simpson, pg. 18). It is also useful to have the ability to add time limits to the quiz, to limit the number of attempts made by a student and, to be able to quickly assign a value for a quiz.

I believe the more time I spend exploring Moodle the more I will recognize its benefits.

References:

Gibbs, G. and Simpson. (2005). “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Accessed online 28 Nov 2010 http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf

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