Category Archives: CS4

I believe our instructor in this story can use the quiz feature found in Moodle and choose to input a feedback for each selection students make. This way students get the feedback required in an automated manner when the instructor uses the auto-correct question types such as multiple choice. Prior asking students to take the quiz I recommend posting some interactive content that offers a self-learning approach to the periodic table.

I can definitely see where Boris would have a problem with students knowing the periodic table. Having a science undergraduate background, it is very difficult to stay on top of all the material if the core foundation of knowledge isn’t already understood. I have been there before as a student many times. It is a neat situation that with educational/media technologies where they are today, Boris has a lot more options now than he had a decade ago. If he really spends the time to create a useful review tool for his students, it could be something he uses regularly in his class. Or perhaps something he could post on the Internet for others to utilize. I can’t imagine being in Boris’ situation where you know that your students need time for review and feedback but the curriculum doesn’t provide that resource that they need. I wonder where the failure in the learning process is happening? The course curriculum, the school schedule, Boris’ organizational methods, student engagement? There are lots of possible issues that could lead towards the gap in learning for his students. I think it is admirable that Boris wants to try and fix the problem with a review tool. I know many teachers that would just kind of give up because they don’t think they could fix the issue. It will be interesting to see what kind of tool Boris comes up with and if there are a subset of students that it does not work for. Reading through Gibbs & Simpson (2005) it does appear as if there is quite the variety of ways to implement assessments and that there are varying degrees of success with the assessments based on their structure and intent.

Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31.

Interestingly enough, I believe that I have had the exact same issue as Boris regarding the incomprehension towards the periodic table.  That being said, my experience in general agrees with Boris and is similar to the observations by Gibbs, Simpson, Gravestock, and Hills (2005); students perform better on assignments than on quizzes and tests.  I was wondering if in part this might be that students consider assignment as more relevant and authentic.

In my personal experience, assessments have mainly served only one of the purposes described by Bates (2014):  to assess knowledge « in terms of desired learning goals or outcomes».  A few years back, our department was highly encouraged to have the same assessments across all teachers of a subject, which was probably intended to mean the same summative assessments, yet was interpreted as all assessment; restricting the role of formative assessment as a learning opportunity.  The assessments, created by a single teacher, were at times provided to the rest of the staff one week before the assessment was to be written; as such it created confusion among the students trying to understand which elements were most relevant to study.  In some rare cases, this confusion lead to doubt in the minds of the students regarding whether or not the teacher was actually covering the appropriate material. Teachers would create a mad-dash review covering the assessed material a few days before the quiz/test was given.  An undesired effect of this was that students did not properly prepare for the assessment; simply waiting for the review.  Eventually, due to time constraints, formative assessments and assignments were faded out (10 -15% of the grade), replaced by summative multiple choice questions MCQ quizzes and tests to mimic the final ministerial exam; 60% of which is MCQ.  Needless to say, instead of preparing the students for the final, this might have actually discouraged many students as it focussed on rote memorization.  We therefore only focussed on assessing competency acquisition and never provided assessment to help learning.

In an attempt to change this situation, a few of my colleagues and I put in place exit card strategies upon which we could provide feedback and used clickers throughout our lessons and end-of year reviews to provide direct feedback to the students and the teacher regarding the general comprehension of a topic.  We also began to experiment with GoConqr an internet site which enables you to create online quizzes, flashcards and other forms of assessment.  However as these were only put in place at the end of the year, the students, who were not used to completing parts of their course online, were not too sure about their use and did not use these resources to their full potential.  Boris is quite fortunate in the sense that as his students already use Moodle, using the evaluation tools within or with another provider is not that far a stretch for his students.

As a side note,  the use of MCQs as described by Jenkins (2004)really intrigued me.   Although I am not too sure how to best combine MCQ with case studies, I am looking forward to trying this in my future.

References:

Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age. Open Textbook.

Gibbs, G., Simpson, C., Gravestock, P., & Hills, M. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.

Jenkins, M. (2004). Unfulfilled promise: formative assessment using computer-aided assessment. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 67-80.

This case study is an example of rote memorization being an unfortunate must – a piece of the foundational construct of knowledge that is necessary for higher-order learning.  Just as we try to ensure that students have the basics of writing under their belts, so they have more mental capacity freed up for tougher concepts, it sounds like knowing the periodic table needs to be down pat.

In my experiences the times when this kind of retention is needed have been relatively few and far between, with skills being the emphasis rather than content.  When it’s come up, however, I’ve found that providing students with a combination of options tends to work well, although it’s important not to overwhelm them with choice.

Using platforms that make studying into a game might be a great way to engage Boris’s students, and can be done either at the start of class (if he can spare 10 minutes, it’ll likely set a fun tone to the rest of their time together) or on student’s own time.  Kahoot! is an awesome quiz game platform that students can play from any kind of device – and Boris wouldn’t even need to make the game to host, as a quick search of Public (user-shared) Kahoots just showed me a bunch related to the periodic table.  Boris could download the class results after the game, and keep them as a measurement of progress – even sharing them (with pseudonyms) if students want to watch their own progress.

A site like Quizlet offers not only a simple game or two for students to test their knowledge, but a flash-card and quiz option, to take it a little more ‘seriously’.  Boris could also ask the students to complete a brief quiz on the table throughout a week (or more) as part of their daily tasks, through either a quiz or even survey-making platform.  He would be sent the students’ results to help with his own tracking, and it would tell the students their gaps in knowledge with immediacy.  If the quizzes are brief enough they will hopefully not feel overly burdened, but if they are frequent enough results should make themselves known before too long.

I’ve used all of these tools in the past with success, but haven’t applied them consistently over the long-term.  If I was in Boris’ shoes and felt that certain content-specific knowledge was needed for bigger-picture success I would try to plan out a program that would get his lagging students to where they need to be, and hope that it wouldn’t take too much extra time out of their busy work-weeks to see improvements!

Boris’ students would benefit from an educational game, such as a matching exercise that would help students make the correct associations within the periodic table. Games are great because they can be reused again and again until the student masters the material. They are more fun than traditional review exercises and are often suitable for rote memorization of basic learning materials.

The downside is that most LMSs don’t have the capacity to build games within the system. However, Boris could always create it on an external program and then upload it or the link into Moodle.The periodic table is such a basic science concept, that there must be existing games out there that Boris can use without needing to spend the time creating his own.

He could then have his student play the game, and then take a quiz which he builds inside the LMS to assess their learning. If students give incorrect answers, they could be redirected automatically to appropriate course material. Knowing which questions were missed would indicate to Boris what areas are still problematic and require review.

Playing educational games isn’t likely as motivating as playing Minecraft, but perhaps some incentives could be added. The students with the best or fastest scores could get the privilege of skipping the review class, which they obviously wouldn’t need anyway. In Grade 11, that would have been enough to motivate me! LOL.

Boris’ case is a challenging one as time always seems to be a predominant factor that works against building in content according to student needs. Additionally, the case calling for both instant and formative feedback is a tall order, and one that a teacher doesn’t come by without either a steep technological learning curve or by dedicating abundant amounts of time outside of class to support either students or the creation of media.

Boris should probably begin by creating a series of video tutorials to reinforce the periodic table content that he is aiming to support. Since information about the periodic table would be comprised of mostly static knowledge in a Chemistry 11 context, he could very likely use these comfortably from year to year over multiple iterations of courses without changing them.

After creating the video tutorials, Boris could use a tool like Google Forms or Moodle’s built-in quiz application to have student quiz themselves, or use these to study for exams. Each of these tools could easily tell them what they did right and wrong; the tricky part here is giving formative feedback. I am not as familiar with Moodle’s quiz tool, but I know that Google Forms allows you to route a form according to the respondent’s entry. So, for example, if a student picked an answer of “False” incorrectly, they could be re-routed to a page that gave them feedback on the fact that that answer was incorrect and why. After that page, they could re-answer the question and continue along with the quiz. Likewise, if they answered “True” correctly, a page could appear that reinforced their response and told them why the statement was indeed true, and they would, again, carry on with the quiz.

This strategy would provide immediate feedback for response correctness as well as make an attempt at giving formative feedback. A drawback to these methods is that the feedback isn’t necessarily personalized as to why the student might respond correctly or incorrectly. Additionally, Boris would need to be insightful as to why students may or may not make particular mistakes; this insight would help to provide the best possible feedback to students as they quiz themselves. Lastly, it would take Boris some time to build, particularly if he was not familiar with the affordances of routing pages on quiz tools. However, if successful, he could also reuse these quizzes with immediate and formative feedback throughout future iterations of the course as well.