Section 5.3. Effective Quiz Practices

5.3. Effective Quiz Practices

As we've seen, the Moodle quiz engine is a powerful, flexible tool for monitoring and diagnosing a student's understanding of certain types of knowledge. Using this tool effectively can boost your course's effectiveness and promote student performance. While a computer-scored quiz is a different evaluation than more open-ended assessments, it does give valuable insight into student thinking, especially when you use good strategies and a little creativity.

5.3.1. Quiz Strategies

Of course, using the quiz engine effectively takes some work and practice. The first thing to do is use effective question-design strategies. If you ask good questions, you'll get useful data about your students' performance and understanding of the material. Of course, the converse is also true. There is a ton of literature about effective assessment design available. I'll just highlight a few of the most important ideas:

• Tie each question to a course goal. After all, you want to know whether your students are achieving the goals of the course, so why not ask them directly?

• Try to ask multiple questions about each important idea in the class. This gives you more data points about a student's understanding.

• When writing a multiple-choice question, be sure each wrong answer represents a common misconception. This will help you diagnose student thinking and eliminate easy guessing.

• Write questions requiring your students to think at different levels. Include recall questions, comprehension questions, and application and analysis questions. You can determine where students are having problems in their thinking. Can they recall the material but not apply it?

• Test your questions. After you've established an initial question bank, use the system reports to determine which questions are useful and which aren't. As you write new questions, give them a lower point value and throw in a few to establish their reliability.

Once you have a few well-written test banks, be sure to use the quiz reports and statistics to monitor your classes' performance. The detailed reports and statistics are valuable tools for measuring your students' understanding of the material.

5.3.2. Creative Quiz Uses

With the Moodle quiz engine, it's easier to utilize educationally sound assessment strategies that would be too difficult to implement with paper and pencil. Most people think of tests as an infrequent, high-stakes activity, e.g., mid-terms and finals. Better strategies involve frequent, low-stakes assessments you and your students can use to guide their performance during the course of the semester.

Creating a series of mini-tests gives you a very flexible system for gauging performance and keeping students engaged in the class. Here are a few ideas for quick quizzes you can use as part of a larger assessment strategy.

5.3.2.1. Chapter checks

Getting students to complete reading assignments has to be one of the hardest motivational tasks in education. Reading is critical to understanding most material and fundamental to success in many classes. The problem for most students is there is no immediate punishment for procrastinating on a reading assignment. If you haven't done the reading for a class discussion, you can either keep quiet or, as I used to do occasionally, wing it by skimming in class. If you have a lecture course, there's almost no need to do the reading since the lecturer usually covers most of the material in class anyway.

Creating a mini-test for each reading assignment solves a number of problems. First, it encourages students to do the reading so they can do well on the quiz. Second, it gives the students feedback on how well they understood the reading assignment. Third, it gives you data about which aspects of the reading students found confusing, and which they have already mastered so you can refocus your class activities.

For a reading mini-test, I would recommend setting a limited time quiz students can take only once. Because it's a low-stakes activity, you want students to use for self-assessment, I would also display feedback and correct answers. If you're concerned about students sharing answers after they've taken the quiz, randomize the question and answer order. If you have a test bank, make some of the questions random as well. As an additional assignment, students should write down one question about a question they got wrong and bring it to class.

5.3.2.2. Test practice

They key to effective practice is to have a realistic practice environment. Many students worry about tests, especially high-stakes tests, because they have no idea what to expect. What question format will you use? How detailed will the questions be? What should they study?

You can help alleviate test anxiety by creating a practice test students can take to help answer these questions. These tests are usually based on old questions similar to the upcoming test questions. Using last years final as an example test will force you to write new questions every year. This is a good idea anyway, since you can be sure someone has a copy of last year's test and are sharing it with others.

To set up a practice test, I'd create a zero-point test with questions from the year before in random order with random answers. I would also allow students to take the test as many times as they'd like so they can test themselves as much as they need. Display feedback, but not correct answers so it presents more of a challenge.

5.3.2.3. Data gathering

As an expert, you know a lot about your field. Your challenge as a teacher is to translate your knowledge for a novice who doesn't share your conceptual understanding or experience. An example or lecture you think is brilliant may leave your students completely confused. It can be hard to tell what students really understand and what's leaving them baffled.

A data-gathering quiz is similar to a chapter check, but it takes place after a class meeting or lecture. Your goal is to quickly get some feedback on your students' understanding of a lecture. What did they really understand? What do you need to spend more time on? I've found many instructors have trouble gauging what students find difficult, and what the students find so easy they are bored by it.

Setting up a post-class, data-gathering quiz is similar to creating a chapter check. Set the quiz for a limited time, such as a day or two before the next meeting. Allow your students to take it once and display feedback and correct answers.

5.3.3. Quiz Security and Cheating

Of course, online testing also presents another chance for the cheaters in your classes to try to game the system. Most online quizzes are meant to be taken at home, or at least outside of class. Students can download the questions and print them out. They can take the tests with other students, or while reading their textbooks.

Fortunately, you can counter many of these strategies, making them more trouble than they are worth to students. Let's look at a few strategies for countering most cheating schemes:

Printing and sharing questions

If you display feedback and correct answers, students can print the results page and share it with their friends. Or they can simply print the questions themselves directly from the quiz. The key to discouraging this behavior is to randomize the question order and answer order. It makes the printouts a lot less useful. Creating larger question banks and giving tests with random subsets is also an effective strategy. If students can print only a small number of questions at a time, they will need to view the test again and again, and then sort the questions to eliminate duplicates.

Using the textbook

Students will frequently look up the answer to questions in the textbook or a reading. If you are giving a chapter-check quiz, then this is what you want them to do. Otherwise, you need to come up with creative ways to make the textbook less directly useful. Timed quizzes are the single most effective tool for eliminating this strategy. If you include enough questions and make the time to take the quiz short enough, students won't have time to look up all the answers. I usually allot about 30 seconds per multiple-choice question. If they answer them faster and have time to look up some answers afterward, I figure they knew enough to deserve the option of looking up an answer or two.

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Warning: Assume there will be printed copies of your questions available to students who want them. Most instructors don't realize students frequently have copies of old paper-based tests, and delivering a test electronicly is another way for students to get copies of the questions. I know one professor who had over 1,100 questions in his online test bank. At the end of the semester, he confiscated a printout from a student. It had every question with the correct answer, neatly formatted and divided by textbook chapter. We decided if students wanted to memorize 1,100 questions to the level where they could answer a small number of them displayed at random, then they would have learned more than if they had just studied. Of course, we used timed quizzes and other strategies to minimize using the printout as a reference manual.

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Asking students to apply their knowledge to novel situations can also make a difference. Synthesis and application questions can't be looked up. Students have to understand the material and apply it creatively to answer the questions. So while they may take the time to review the text, they will still need to understand what they've read to successfully answer the question.

Working with friends

If your students are on the same campus, they may meet in a lab and try to take the quiz together. This strategy is easily thwarted with random question order, random answer order, and random questions pulled from a test bank. If my screen doesn't look like yours, then it's harder for us to quickly answer all of the questions. A timed quiz also makes it harder for the two of us to cheat if we have different questions and only a short amount of time to answer.

Have someone else take the test

The old adage goes, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." And no one knows who is actually taking the test. Students will sometimes pay classmates, or others who have taken the course in the past, to take online quizzes for them. There are two ways to counter this strategy. One, have an occasional proctored exam where students need to show ID. If they haven't taken the quizzes or done the work until then, they will do poorly on the proctored exam. Second, to eliminate current classmates from taking each other's quizzes, make them available only for a short time. You could require everyone to take the test within a two- to four-hour block. If the test is properly randomized, it will be very difficult to take it more than once during the testing period. The test-taker will worry about his own grade first, then about his employer's grade.

Obviously, there are many strategies students can use to cheat. While it would be naïve to assume there isn't cheating, the vast majority of your students want to succeed on their own merits. The anonymity of the online environment may open up new avenues for the cheaters, but it's not really much different from your face-to-face classes. A few people will go to great lengths to cheat, but most will be honest as long as it's not too easy to get away with it. A few precautions will eliminate most of the cheaters, and the classic strategies will work for the others.