Ed in ETEC

What is troubling Boris’ students?

Reading the description of this week’s case, I think Boris needs to first investigate as to why students who do well on lab exercises cannot translate that level of competency onto unit tests. Depending on what the issue is, his solution can be drastically different.

In my years of teaching science at the high school level, one of the most common reasons why students who do well on labs don’t do well on test is because of the disconnectedness between lab work and tests. Over the years, I have tried to make the two more related – after all, both laboratory work and tests are tools used to enhance and measure student learning. If Boris notices that his tests are completely disconnected from his labs, he should review and perhaps modify that to make the labs and/or the tests more relevant and related.

Another area of difficulty students have is their anxiety towards test writing. I believe this is where the Moodle quiz function can help. After each lab activity, or at the end of each week, Boris can post a review quiz on Moodle and asks students to complete it. As long as the quizzes created are in the format of true-false, multiple-choice, or matching questions, Boris actually would not have the need to mark them – Moodle will do that. These practice quizzes can be used by students to review course materials; it will also help reduce the anxiety they feel towards tests.

The quiz function in Moodle allows Boris to enter feedback for each response, whether the response is the correct one, or the incorrect one. The initial input process can take a very significant amount of time (imagine creating a feedback for every choice in every question in every quiz), so I don’t think it’s feasible to expect Boris to have completed them all. But for starters, just creating a weekly review quiz and/or a post-lab quiz on Moodle would enhance and consolidate the learning experience of the students.