Introduction

Overall the process of researching and developing a quiz for my LMS course site was a very educationally enlightening experience. Specifically, from the readings I learnt of the intrinsic importance of assessment and timely & appropriate feedback in the student learning process. I was unaware of the relationship between assessment and student motivation levels. Also, I did not realise how assessment can help ensure students spend amble “time on task”. While personally I have always appreciated and seen value in receiving feedback, I now have a deeper understand how it fits into the learning process and how to use it more effectively. Timely and appropriate being the key points I retained here.

Process

For this assignment I decided to create a summative assessment quiz to be taken at the end of my “Beginner Programming with Scratch” LMS course. The quiz can be viewed here.  I had three main objectives when developing this quiz.  These were as per listed by George Brown as “Purposes of Assessment” in his article “Assessment: a Guide for Lecturers”:

• To motivate students.
• To provide feedback to students to improve their learning.
• To diagnose a student’s strengths and weaknesses.

Additional to these objectives I also tried to keep two other things in mind during this exercise. The first relating to Brown, Bull & Pendlebury (1997) point that:

“Since assessment measures only a sample of what students know, there is a risk that the sample being taken is not indicative of students’ knowledge.”

To address this I tried to ensure inclusion of questions that covered materials from each of the course modules.  Also, in the hope that it would allow students to better demonstrate what they know, I include a number of essay/problem questions. For the first section of these essay/problem questions I gave students a choice of 3 out of 5 problems. My rational for this was to give students a choice on how to relate what they have learnt.

Secondly, I tried to keep in mind the following conditions related to feedback from Gibbs and Simpson’s (2005) list of points to consider when assessing students learning.

• Condition 4 – Sufficient feedback is provided, both often enough and in enough detail.
• Condition 5 – The feedback focuses on students’ performance, on their learning and on actions under the students’ control, rather than on the students themselves and on their characteristics
• Condition 6 – The feedback is timely in that it is received by students while it still matters to them and in time for them to pay attention to further learning or receive further assistance
• Condition 7 – Feedback is appropriate to the purpose of the assignment and to its criteria for success
• Condition 8 – Feedback is appropriate, in relation to students’ understanding of what they are supposed to be doing.

To address these conditions, where possible I tried to add detailed explanations/feedback to the quiz.  This was for both correct and incorrect responses. To ensure timeliness the feedback is be displayed to the students immediately after they take the quiz.

Challenges/Issues

In general I found this exercise very challenging technically and pedagogically. I have never created an assessment of any type (on or off-line) before nor used Moodle’s assessment tools. It took me a long time to come up with possible (and what I hope is) appropriate questions and feedback to add to the quiz. Furthermore, as I was trying to create a summative assessment I found it difficult to ensure the quiz had good coverage of the learning materials. This was mainly due to the fact I have not yet finished developing all the course materials. Maybe it would have been better to create a quiz for a single completed module of the course rather than the whole course itself.

References

• Brown, G. (2001) Assessment: A Guide for Lecturers, Generic Assessment Series, No. 3, LTSN Generic Centre, York.
• Brown, G., Bull, J., and Pendlebury, M. (1997). Assessing student learning in higher education.  London: Routledge.
• Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005).  “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. Accessed online 15^th June  2011 here.
• Jenkins, M. (2004).  “Unfulfilled Promise: formative assessment using computer-aided assessment.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 67-80. Accessed online 15^th June  2011 here.
• The TLT Group. “Seven Principles” Collection of Ideas for Teaching and Learning with Technology.  Accessed online 15^th June  2011 here.