Assessment for Learning: Using Moodle Quizzes

Guidelines from Senate Office on Assessment schemes and University Code

of Assessment can be found here:
http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/senateoffice/academic/assessmentpolicies

Being creative with formative and summative assessment can seem a

daunting task, but technology can assist with this and give students and
tutors accessible ways to widen both ideas about assessment and the kinds of
assessment that we ask students to partake in. This series of practice notes
has been designed to give you helpful tips on best practice in using Moodle
tools for assessment.

Formative Learning and Assessing

Most students think of tests or exams as infrequent (once or twice a year) highstakes activities and therefore, the uncertainty that can be attached to this
process for them can be stressful. More frequent and lower/no stakes tests
(formative tests) can help to alleviate this problem and act as a guide for
students and tutors to gauge performance and understanding of a subject
throughout a course or programme.
Formative assessment for learning can achieve a range of benefits such as

finding out where students are starting from

discovering common misconceptions
piloting new assessment techniques for potential barriers and/or errors
assisting students in mastering skills before being summatively assessed
achieving techniques or learning goals throughout a course
identifying strengths and weaknesses whilst there is still time to do
something about it.

Where are you starting from?

Whilst you are an expert in your own subject, translating that knowledge for a
novice and ensuring that they grasp it can be a challenge. One way of making
this task easier is to find out where your students are starting from. You can
do this at the beginning of a course or programme as well as at several crucial
points throughout a course or programme by using a data-gathering quiz.

Tips:

Create a series of small mini-quizzes which will give you a flexible system
for gauging performance and keeping students engaged (for example,
quizzes that interrogate the students understanding of particular reading
assignments for the course). You want to find out: what they understood
and what they may need to spend more time on.

Set the data-gathering quiz for a limited time (eg. a day or two) and
ideally before the next time that your class meets. Only allow students
to take this kind of quiz once, but display any feedback immediately.

Making Effective use of Categories in Moodle

Quiz
Quizzes allow tutors to design and set quizzes consisting of a large variety of
Question types which are kept in the course Question bank which can be shared
with other tutors on a site wide basis in a single Moodle installation. Making
effective use of the categorization of Moodle Quiz questions allows for a
strategic design of rich re-useable collaborative quizzes.
Tips:
Instead of trying to build a single quiz, think about the kinds of questions that
you wish to ask and what categories those might fall into. If you teach in
languages, for example, you might wish to construct questions on grammar,
punctuation, verb endings or word order. Or, if you teach in Nursing, for
example, you might wish to construct questions on drug calculations,
conversions, hypertension, midwifery and so on. Creating these categories and
assigning your questions to the appropriate category with an identifiable system
will ensure that you are able to build up a sustainable number of questions in
your Moodle site. Once there are a reasonable number of categories to choose
from, colleagues can collaboratively use and add to both the categories and the
questions found in the Moodle Quiz engine.
1

Providing Feedback

1
See also: Juwah, C. et al (2004) Enhancing student learning
through effective feedback, The Higher Eduction Academy.

Feedback on performance is a critical part of a learning environment and

assessment is one of the most important activities in education. Whilst we can
not always be sure what a student has learned, we can give them opportunities
to demonstrate their learning through formative learning exercises like quizzes.
Quizzes that are rich in feedback can act as a critical tool for students to gauge
their own level of performance on a specific topic. The use of formative testing
in this way can contribute a great deal to alleviating summative exam stress for
students as well as give tutors a good idea of how well (or not) students are
progressing in a given course or topic. Extensive feedback attached at the
individual answer level can allow students to select from answers which include
common misconceptions about particular issues and receive detailed feedback
in response to their answer. In this way, such descriptive feedback can offer
information about a students performance as it relates to the learning goals of
the subject or course. Indeed effective descriptive feedback focuses on the
intended learning, identifies specific strengths, points to areas needing
improvement, suggests a route of action students can take to close the gap
between where they are now and where they need to be, takes into account the
amount of corrective feedback the learner can act on at one time, and models
the kind of thinking students will engage in when they self-assess (Chappuis
and Chappuis, 2008) .
2

The Moodle Quiz engine is a powerful and robust tool that can be adjusted (in
the settings) for any number of quiz kinds to achieve specific aims and goals.
Tips:

Set the quiz so that users are allowed multiple attempts which are
automatically marked and which give immediate feedback and/or show
the correct answers.
Set randomly generated quizzes from pools of questions.
Use the Moodle quiz reports to see, at a glance, what percentage of your
class has done well in a particular area and what percentage has not.
Similarly, you can easily spot where the general misunderstanding or
weakness is in a cohort and work to address or correct them quickly with
refresher lectures, seminars or other tools.

Some Quiz Strategies

2
Chappuis, S. and Chappuis, J. (2008) The Best Value in Formative
Assessment, Educational Leadership, December 2007/January 2008
65:4: 14-19.

Using Moodle Quiz can take some work and practice, but if you use effective
question and category design strategies then the rewards will soon be obvious.
Tips:

Tie individual questions to specific course aims and goals.

Ask multiple questions about each important idea/issue in the course
material (this will give you more points of student understanding to
analyze).
When writing a multiple-choice question, be sure each wrong answer
represents a common mis-conception (this will help you diagnose student
thinking and eliminate easy guessing).
Write questions which require students to think at varying levels about
the same topic or issue. This will help you to determine if/where students
are having problems in their learning process (eg. can they recall the
material, but not apply it?)
Pilot your questions.
Use the Moodle quiz reports and grade book to monitor performance. The
detailed reports and statistics available to you are valuable tools.