Assessment Supporting Learning
When I try to learn something, I often think I know it after the 1st round. When I was teaching myself html and css, I thought I knew it all because I could create one web page. Then I found some online quizzes at w3schools.com. I tried them and quickly learned how much I did not know. I was forced to go back and reread materials and research more to get perfect on the quizzes.
I keep this in mind when I use online quizzes with my students. Quizzes are an assessment tool that gives the student the opportunity to discover what they know and do not know. In my experience, students are always more concerned by what they don’t know. By giving the learner the chance at a couple of attempts on a quiz, I am giving them the chance to go back and review notes or look things up on the internet. These small quizzes are great motivational tools to get students to learn the terminology for subjects. Multiple choice, matching and short answer questions offer the learner the opportunity to test their knowledge with immediate feedback. Students also hate waiting for results. They want feedback ASAP so letting students see the score after the 1st attempt and then giving full feedback after both attempts is well received.
In my moodle course site, I think I would change things a bit and set up a series of quizzes to be taken after every web workshop unit. That way the students can check their knowledge as they progress through the activities. The small quizzes could be self administered, giving the more advanced students the ability to jump ahead and giving the slower more methodical students time to learn.
The essay questions require higher problem solving skills and the prof needs to mark them. I am not conviniced this would serve as a good assessment tool in a web design course. I prefer a major project where the student demonstrates their abilities to design, create and publish a web site.
Creating the questions and the quiz is easy for me. The moodle interface is different than the learning management system I use, Desire2Learn (D2L), but the ideas and concepts are the same. I love that the quizzes mark themselves and send the grade to the gradebook. Although it takes a lot of time to set up the pool of questions, the marking is painless. I reuse the question pool every time I teach the course. With a pool of questions, I can create unique quizzes for every student. When you work in a computer lab, it is easy for students to just peak at the neighbours monitor. I always warn students that the questions will be different and the answers scrabbled. I only put one question per page, that way the students can’t peak effectively. The chances of students being on the same question at the same time is almost impossible. I have never had a student complain that having different quizzes is unfair.