Assessment
I do not believe that online assessment activities using multiple choice and short answer are effective summative assessment tasks to measure communicative performance in a foreign language. Nevertheless, they are useful because they are motivating and give students formative feedback in their own time, taking the linguistic practice out of the classroom. “Staff have found that students welcome doing formative tests and that it frees up staff time to focus on problems (Jekins, 2004, p. 73). The author adds that “students can access the tests whenever they need and they are able to repeat them, obtaining feedback on all their attempts. (Jenkins, 2004, p. 76). What is more they don’t need to be marked by hand. As Gibbs and Simpson (2005, p. 8) note, “The trick when designing assessment regimes is to generate engagement with learning tasks without generating piles of marking”.
In my course I have put links to external online exercises that are purely formative as no grade is put onto the grade sheet, but the practice quiz I have designed for the e portfolio is both summative and formative. It allows the students to take the test more than once and records only the highest grade. This summative component acts as a stimulus for the students to practice and prepare for the final exam. There are 43 questions of varied types. Most of the questions are automatically graded, but the two essay questions require a teacher mark. Though the exam mixes up the questions and the order of the answers, the questions are the same every time. However, when I have a bigger bank of questions I will be able to offer different versions. The exam can only be taken once a day to give me time to correct the essay based questions. I am pleased with the questions that are short answer, but automatically marked. I was able to use the asterisk (*) to allow variable answers as the question was about form rather than content. The exam offers overall feedback at the end and also individual feedback for some of the questions. I was quite disappointed with Moodle quiz, as I couldn’t do many of the things I had planned. One of the limitations was designing an exercise with multiple questions. For example, I couldn’t make a reading or listening comprehension with multiple questions. Each question has to be separate and so I had to repeat the text many times to ensure that it appeared with each question. I tried both writing the questions in Hotpotoes and importing them or directly creating the questions in the Moodle quiz, but neither option was entirely effective. My next task is to learn to use the formulas in the grade book option so that I can include all of the assessment exercises in the final grade. My flashiest question so far is the listening comprehension. I was able to get the audio file to open in the question. The student can listen and then answer. This was really tricky and I am proud that I was able to do it.
I also made several graded exercises in Hotpotatoes and uploaded them as SCORM packets. These work much better than the Moodle quiz that I used for this practice test. The only Hotpotatoes SCORM package that doesn’t work properly is the crossword. I believe there is a bug in the program as I have tried everything but I can’t get it to work.
Here is the link to my quiz: http://moodle.met.ubc.ca/mod/quiz/view.php?id=4258
And here is the link to an exercise I made in Hotpotatoes and uploaded as a SCORM packet:
http://moodle.met.ubc.ca/mod/scorm/view.php?id=4021
http://moodle.met.ubc.ca/mod/scorm/view.php?id=3845
http://moodle.met.ubc.ca/mod/scorm/view.php?id=3855
http://moodle.met.ubc.ca/mod/scorm/view.php?id=3844
I hope you like the exercises!
References:
Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005). “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Accessed online March 4, 2010, from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf
Jenkins, M. (2004). “Unfulfilled Promise: formative assessment using computer-aided assessment.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, i, 67-80. Retrieved March 4, 2010, from http://resources.glos.ac.uk/tli/lets/journals/lathe/issue1/index.cfm