I am designing my Moodle as a standalone online course that aims to refresh and teach English pronunciation to English teachers who are non native English speakers. The course runs for 6 weeks, and in the first week students are required to introduce themselves to the class and take a pretest pronunciation quiz. The quiz is intended as a self-assessment, to gauge students’ current knowledge of English pronunciation. Chickering & Gamson (1987 as cited in Gibbs & Simpson, 2005 ) claimed that ‘Knowing what you know and don’t know focuses learning” In getting started, students need help in assessing existing knowledge and competence (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005 ). This pretest quiz will also help me as an instructor to assess the students’ current knowledge, so the lesson can be adapted to meet students’ levels and needs.
Moodle allows for a wide range of assessment strategies. The quiz module includes the following response types: fill-ins, multiple-choice, multi-choice (more than one answer can be selected), true-false, matching, and short answer (exact matching). All types are supported with automatic feedback and scoring. The essay module allows open-ended questions with built-in comment boxes for instructors to provide feedback. All of these assessment types can be time restricted and password protected, and can be set to allow for limited or multiple attempts.
In my pretest quiz, I have created 5 multiple choice, 3 matching, and 2 short answer questions that will be graded immediately. This will give students instant feedback so that they may assess their own learning (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005) Each question has immediate feedback such as “You did not get it right this time, try again later” or “You almost got it right” and when students answer the question correctly there is feedback to compliment students such as “Great job” and there is an explanation explaining why that answer is correct. As the final 2 essay questions would be manually graded later, I think it is important that I remind students in a general feedback box that they should not panic if their scores are lower than they expected. Maintaining motivation, was the most important and influential issue for new students in their first assignment of the course (Gibbs & Simpson, 2002).
Creating quizzes manually in the Moodle was not as difficult as I had anticipated. Chapter 6, “Quizzes”, of the book Using Moodle written by Jason Cole and Helen Foster, was very informative and came in handy. However, the features that I was confused about and took a while to figure out, were the “Attempts allowed” and “Question Behavior” modes. I wanted my students to have as many attempts as they wished as this is a pretest self assessment quiz. I wanted them to assess where their current knowledge stands and at the same time they can learn new knowledge from the formative feedback and explanation of each answer. At the beginning, I misunderstood that “attempts allowed” meant that students can retry immediately after submitting the answer to the question. But when I set up the Question Behavior as “immediate feedback” students could see immediately if they had answered the question correctly but they could not retry because the system did not allow them to do so. Later, I changed the Question Behavior to “adaptive mode” where students could receive immediate feedback and retry with another answer. However, there was a problem with the matching questions of this quiz. After students submitted the answer there was no immediate feedback, students had to wait until they finished the whole quiz to see the feedback. I was frustrated with this and finally decided to choose “immediate feedback” for question behavior instead of “adaptive mode”. This way, students are unable to retry but receive immediate feedback for every question, and since I set the quiz to be “attempts allowed” students can come back and try again after finishing the first attempt.
I find that the “review attempt” section is quite useful for teachers to see students’ grades and their progress. I accidentally found the report attempt section and was amazed at the detail it provided. Because I allowed anyone who logged into MET Moodle to enroll in my course, two of my classmates took my quiz while I was still creating it. When I wanted to add more questions to the quiz, the system did not allow me to do so. I was concerned because I had not finished my assignment of making a quiz just yet. Later on, I found two of my classmate’s attempts, their names, the scores they received, and time they spent on the quiz. I had to delete those attempts so I could continue adding more questions. I appreciated the review attempts feature because it allowed me to see a history of students’ attempts and responses and this will help me understand their thinking pattern so I can better assist them in their learning and future course design.
As this online course is for adult in service teachers, the assessments will be focused on students’ participation, self assessment, weekly reflection, final presentation as a culminating activity, and peer review. I find that peer review is very useful for giving and receiving feedback. Besides helping spot errors and improving the other’s students work, Gibbs & Simpson (2005) stated that the real value may lie in students internalizing the standards expected so that they can supervise themselves and improve the quality of their own assignments prior to submitting them.
Creating quizzes requires a great deal of work in setting up and testing, especially the first time it is implemented. However, online quizzes have great advantages for rapid and automatic scoring and grading. Students that take online quizzes with computer-based feedback score much better on exams than stronger students that don’t (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005). No matter whether online quizzes are for the purpose of formative or summative assessment, they can be very effective in engaging students in their learning, therefore they are a good part of a successful teaching strategy.
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References
Cole, J. & Foster, H. (2008). Using Moodle (2nd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc. Retrieved from http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/Using_Moodle_book
Gibbs, G. & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf