Quiz+Strategies



How do you make an effective quiz in Moodle that will assess what ideas or concepts you are trying to ensure that your students have mastered and a particular point? Moodle gives you a wide variety of methods to make your individual quizzes that will meet the goals that you have when you assign a formal assessment such as a quiz.
 * Quiz Strategies** **& Effective Quiz Practices**

If the questions in your quiz cover the goals or the objectives you have for your lesson plan, you should develop good quiz questions. Also, if you ask several similar questions in a different way or by using a different format about a single idea or concept several times during a quiz, you will have a good idea as to whether or not your students really understand the course material and this will probably be evident in their performance on a quiz.

If you are asking a multiple choice question give them the right answer as a choice. Choose a wrong answer that closely represents a common mistake that people make on a particular concept, this will help to eliminate guessing by students. And finally, its a good idea to have a few wrong answers that are obviously the wrong answer. Students, if they understand the material, should be able to choose the correct answer.

Try to incorporate some questions which require your students to utilize [|critical thinking skills]. This will require your students to analyze and apply what they know in order to successfully answer the question. Do the students know the correct answer to a question but they can't really apply their knowledge to come up with the correct answer?

Finally, if you write good questions, you will probably get good answers and that will be reflected in your students performance on your quiz. Write bad questions, well...

Moodle is very intuitive when it comes to grading your quiz questions. It is pretty cut and dried, the student either got the correct answer or the wrong answer. There is very little room for open-ended type answers for the most part.
 * Scoring Your Online Quiz Questions**

//Note: Moodle does give you the ability for essay questions, for all of the English teachers out there, and you do have the ability to manually grade the answers to these essay questions.//

You may find out that some of the questions you have written are bad questions, or for some reason or another, your students consistently and in a large proportion miss certain questions. These questions should be re-written before you use them again, or you might consider assigning these questions a lower point value on a quiz.
 * Review Your Question**


 * Specific Strategies for Online Quizzes**

Getting students to actually read the required material in your course has to be one of the biggest challenge to a teacher. How do you know that your students actually read the assignment. If a student does not complete the assignment, normally it might be difficult for you to know this because there is no immediate consequence for not reading the assignment. This is where a chapter check or a mini-quiz can show you immediate feedback whether or not your students completed the assignment. This is especially true in an online environment where you may not meet with your students on a regular basis.
 * Reading Checks or Chapter Checks**

Using this type of a strategy in an online course will encourage students to keep up with their reading as you have assigned them. Chances are when it comes to the real quiz or test time, your students will do much better on these // **BIG** // assessments.

//"Distributed practice is when a student practices a skill or knowledge during many sessions that are short in length and distributed over time. For example, if you're teaching a language course, you might practice every day for one week on a list of vocabulary words. That would be distributed practice. But even more effective would be repeating that practice once a week for the next few weeks."// //Source: Rice//
 * Distributive Quizzes**

By using a Distributed practice over a period of time and then using the online quiz in Moodle, you would have a better chance to ensure that your students truly understand the material over a longer period of time than at just one moment, the day you give the quiz. Every teacher is concerned with quiz or test security. Do the students have copies of your quizzes or tests that you have previously used that they obtained from their friends? By having, and using, a relatively large bank of quiz questions, you can reduce your concerns that students have the questions to the quiz and have memorized the answers before you have even given a quiz. I have used this strategy and it works! I may have 50 - 100 questions covering a particular chapter or unit of study. Many of these questions may assess the same idea or concept but I have written them in a different way or using a different type of question, ie true/false, multiple choice or short answer.
 * Using A Large Test Bank**

So now it's time for a major quiz or test or even for a semester test. I may have over 1000 questions in my test bank for a particular course that I teach. I figure that if my students go to the trouble to print off their old quizzes and tests that I have given over the course of the class and have been able to memorize that many answers to my quiz or test questions they probably deserve to pass because they probably have a good knowledge of what it was I was trying to teach them!

[|Study Guides and Strategies] [|Taking Online Tests] - Study Guides and Strategies
 * Resources:**

Sources: //Using Moodle, Jason Cole, O'Riely Community Press, p. 90-92 Moodle Teaching Techniques, William H. Rice, IV, Packt Publishing, Quiz Solutions p. 63//