As I began to build assessment tools within my Moodle environment, I chose to engage students in both a questionnaire and then a short quiz. The questionnaire is a chance for students to express what they would like to learn about, as well as begin to think about the technology and approaches to photography that they utilize. The quiz was designed to follow the ideas of Daniel Edelson (2001), specifically his “Learning-for-Use” [LfU] model of teaching through inquiry. One of Edelson’s 6 strategies for LfU is to “create demand”. By this, he means to motivate students to pursue learning through “recognition [of] the limitations in one’s knowledge”(Edelson, 2001). If students recognize their limitations to knowledge within the realm of photography, and assuming that they are already engaged in the idea of learning about photography, then this opens up the realm of curiousity within the student. Suddenly the student is questioning his / her knowledge and will begin to be cognizant of the limits of their current level of understanding.
At the same time, I wanted students to be given immediate feedback as to how they performed in this quiz. As the quiz itself is an exercise in recognition of one’s prior knowledge of photographic concepts, students will quickly recognize how comfortable they are within the framework of this course. For students who ‘outperform’ this quiz (ie. score higher than 80%) I would engage in a slightly different dialogue than those who perform poorly. Students who excel on the quiz will be allowed to move at an accelerated pace within the Module itself, being allowed to skip particular exercise(s), whereas those who perform at an average or poor level (ie. less than 80%) will follow a slightly separate stream of learning to build up their knowledge to the level of the “high scoring” students.
One aspect I really like about Moodle’s quiz tool is that I can personalize the message(s) which students see if they score answers correctly or incorrectly. Students who do score poorly will be given messages of encouragement, reinforcing that we are all here to learn the concepts of photography together. These messages are delivered instantly through Moodle’s platform. In Gibb’s and Simpson’s, “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning” (2004), they describe the need for feedback to be regular, relevant, timely, appropriate, and acted upon. All of these attributes of feedback can be quickly established within the Moodle delivery system.
The questions which I created were directly related to the content of the course materials and give students an opportunity to assess what they already know as they begin on their learning journey. Students will either recognize the limits of their knowledge and/or be surprised by their level of prior understanding. This recognition will leverage itself into how students will approach the next step of building knowledge of photographic concepts.
Edelson, D.C. (2001). Learning-for-use: A framework for the design of technology-supported inquiry activities. Journal of Research in Science Teaching,38(3), 355-385.
Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2004). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and teaching in higher education, 1(1), 3-31.