As an educator, assessment is an aspect that is always part of my lesson planning. Therefore, it was interesting to take a look at assessing student understanding on the Moodle platform. Previously, I had never used the quiz function on Moodle. I was surprised to find that Moodle had many question options to choose from. This variety makes it easy for educators to adapt this quiz function to their lessons.
Moodle used a step-by-step format to set up the questions, which made it quite easy to create the questions. The section that I had some difficulty was how much to penalize a student if they answered a question wrong. Since I was creating a review quiz, I decided to enter a penalty of “1” because it would be good for the student to see what mark they would have received if it was an actual exam for marks. The results would also let the teacher see which questions were troubling the student.
One aspect that made the assessment tools in Moodle convenient was how this platform compiles the results of each student’s progress. The teacher can assess the student individually and see the results as a class. This feature is extremely beneficial as it creates an opportunity to see patterns in mistakes to improve teaching.
Similar to creating questions for a face-to-face classroom, I noticed how the wording of each question was important. I think I focused my attention to details even more because students do not have the ease of just raising their hands if they needed clarification. This is one aspect about the assessment tool that I will remember when I create future quizzes.
In terms of troubleshooting, I was able to rely mostly on the help features on the Moodle platform. After I created a question, I would test it out to see if it was the way that I wanted. I think this is the best approach to making sure the platform runs smoothly in the future.
In the end, I was very happy with the way the review quiz turned out. I think it presented a great opportunity to review a novel and check for understanding. It allowed for teachers to assess not just for recall memory but in-depth analysis. The quiz function also had a clear layout and was easy to use and develop. After creating a good sample of questions, I feel I would be able to create more quizzes in a shorter amount of time too.