Using Moodle

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.

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, ...