Assessment
Reflection on creating a “Quiz”
Prior to starting ETEC 565a, I had only really thought of the quiz function in a LMS as a way to deliver multiple choice questions that students had one chance to answer. Within the context of delivering multiple choice questions I hadn’t appreciated the ability to scramble questions, give students multiple attempts and to generate matching questions and embed graphics – perhaps my most important realization was that when you use Chrome as your browser, the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t appear! Embedding an image is much easier when you can see the editor! I also hadn’t really thought through how long it would take to set up the questions. I usually give myself at least half a day to create a test – cut and paste some questions from previous years and create new questions. The process in Moodle is somewhat slower since I am not as familiar with it as I am with Word and there are more clicks involved in setting up a single question, although in the longer term I can see the benefit of having a bank of questions to draw from.
I have come to appreciate that you can “hack” the quiz tool to use it to collect data, you could you use the essay question to require students to submit a weekly journal entry and that it could be used as a self test or self assessment tool for students.
It is this latter aspect that I built into my quiz. The MSTE course I am planning will be a course in chemistry and physics for elementary school teachers, so we have multiple goals, covering the content and relating it to classroom teaching while being able to articulate why we have chosen the teaching methods that we have. (Sound like a MET course?) The course will be online with every second Saturday spent in the lab. My idea was to have the self assessment at the end of the two week cycle as a required but unmarked activity in preparation for the lab session. It would serve to help students identify what they don’t know so that it could be discussed synchronously on the Saturday morning. In fact the final question is just that, what questions do you still have? By having students submit it on the Thursday night, the instructors would have the Friday to evaluate the multiple choice and matching results and review the answers to the short answers and essays to prepare for the Saturday morning synchronous sessions. This is similar to the “formative assessment workshops” described by Gibbs and Simpson in that there isn’t individual feedback, but the review of the material follows shortly after the assignment is due.[1]
I have tried to pair surface level multiple choice or matching questions with higher level short answer questions about the previous question – how did you get that answer, how would you help students learn this? I also included essay question asking the students how they would provide a “hook” to get students interested in the experiment for the Saturday. My thinking was that this would be better appreciated by the students and since this would be the first assessment in the course it needs to be applied, maintain motivation and not focus on the “correction() of errors”.[2] Thus, there is an opportunity for a group discussion on how to teach these topics where there are multiple correct answers in addition to some of the more surface level questions with a correct answer.
Boris’s situation
One aspect of learning the periodic table is simply learning what the symbols for the elements are (ie Au is gold, Ag is silver, C is carbon). With over a hundred elements, this is a challenge for most students and many instructors ask students to learn a shortened list (the first twenty or the forty most abundant). Even then there is still a long list to remember. Two approaches come to mind: meaningful learning such as getting students to prepare presentation on each and how it got its name and uses or memorizing the list. Given the time constraints, it sounds like memorization may be the only option. Essentially you then have a list of names and symbols that go together and these could be used for matching and multiple choice questions. I think it would be worth investigating ways to make this more fun for students. For example, I have heard a nursing instructor talk about using hangman to teach medical terminology (enlargement of the male breast tissue is . . .). Similar questions would work for the elements, what is the name of Co? (its cobalt by the way, copper is Cu). The example was using a Respondus product with Blackboard, I’m not sure if it would work with Moodle, but it would be worth checking.
[1] Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005). “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education pg 19. Accessed online 25 October 2010 http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf
[2] Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005). “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education pg 20. Accessed online 25 October 2010 http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf