What is your rationale?
Provide a rationale for the selection you have made in terms of why the assessment tool you have set up is supportive of your instructional goals, and describe how you see students working within the tool or tools you have set up. What tools are available to you to help you to track or record student activity within the CMS? If you have any concerns or foresee any issues associated with the use of particular tools feel free to raise them in your rationale.
Creating this assessment was a challenge for me. I do not normally give my students tests because much of the work they do is hands-on. Instead, I grade their work on the quality of the work they produce because “coursework marks are a better predictor of long term learning of course content than are exams (Gibbs & Simpson, p. 7).” Given that students will be creating web sites in Dreamweaver and have a world of resources available at their fingertips, I do not see a huge need for them to demonstrate their “at-hand” knowledge by writing a quiz or exam. Further, “in experimental studies in which students have either studied exam-based or assignment-based courses, the quality of their learning has been shown to be higher in the assignment-based courses (Gibbs & Simpson, p. 7).” I prefer to use the different types of assessment such as: projects, peer assessment, self-assessment, and group-based assessment (Jenkins, 2004).
However, since this is a requirement of the assessment, here are my thoughts on the quiz making process in Moodle.
The overall process of creating a quiz using Moodle is relatively straight forward. The only glitch I’ve noticed is that special characters don’t display in the questions if you type them in plain text. For example, if I want to type in the text “<ctrl> + <enter>”, I need to type in the correct HTML code for it to be displayed properly: “<ctrl> + <enter>”. I’m not sure if this is how I’ve setup my Moodle site, but if your questions aren’t displaying properly, this might be the reason why. One good aspect about being able to use HTML code is that it is possible to insert images anywhere in a question because Moodle uses absolute links for uploaded files.
What is included in the quiz:
- 5 multiple choice
- 3 matching
- 3 short answer – I included these and was impressed that they allow the use of wildcards in the response. However, I can also see limitations to wildcards. For example, in an extreme situation, a student could simply copy and paste words from a Dreamweaver term dictionary and hope for the best. If the instructor does not go over the quizzes, then the student will receive undeserved credit.
- 2 (or more) short essay (1) – I did not see any direct method of automatically grading essay questions, but given the subjectivity of the questions, this is a feature that may not be necessary. Feedback for each essay question is given so that students will be able to estimate their score.
Five (5) additional marks for:
- Auto assess/grade – all of the questions auto assess with the exception of the essay.
- Timing (1) for the entire quiz – I kept the quiz timed to 45 minutes using this approximate breakdown
- 1 minute for each multiple choice (5 minutes)
- 1 minute for each T/F (3 minutes)
- 2 minute for each matching question (6 minutes)
- 2 minutes for each short answer (6 minutes)
- 12.5 minutes for each essay question (25 minutes)
- Pre-programmed post-quiz feedback for students (2) – Feedback for students is given after each question and general comments are given for grade ranges post-quiz
- One question with an embedded image or graphic (1) – I included an image of the Dreamweaver Property inspector for the matching question
References
Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005). “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Accessed online 24 June 2009 http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf
Jenkins, M. (2004). “Unfulfilled Promise: formative assessment using computer-aided assessment.” Accessed online 24 June 2009 http://www.glos.ac.uk/shareddata/dms/2B72C8E5BCD42A03907A9E170D68CE25.pdf