Built-in Feedback in Moodle Quizzes

Moodle quizzes provide a lot of opportunities for things to happen automatically based on your settings. You can have them open or close at set times, track the number of attempts that students have taken, as well as generating a thorough breakdown of the quiz results for you. One more thing on that list is automatic feedback.

Moodle quiz feedback can be set in three layers: Overall; General; and Specific. We’ll cover each of the layers and where these settings can be found.

Overall Feedback

Overall Feedback can be found in the settings for the quiz itself. It provides feedback based on a student’s final score on the quiz. In the Overall Feedback section of the quiz settings you will see a set range of 100% to 0% with the option to add more ranges. Each range also comes with a feedback text box, the content from that box will be displayed to students whose scores fall within the grade bounds.

You may use this to give students who achieve highly some quick praise, or you may use this as an opportunity to get a student to schedule a meeting or extra help to talk about the quiz. This text block can include links, so you could connect a form or scheduling website if you use those.

General Feedback

General Feedback is tied to individual questions, as such you can find this when editing a question from the question bank or from a quiz.

General feedback is displayed to all students who received that question as part of their quiz attempt and is displayed depending on your Review Options preferences based on your Quiz Settings.

General feedback is not tied to student performance so you may want to use this for highlighting a question rationale, displaying a worked out answer, or covering a series of points for an essay question.

Specific Feedback

The final and most precise feedback you can build into a quiz is called specific feedback. Like general feedback this can be found in the question settings from the question bank or when editing a question from a quiz.

Unlike general feedback, specific feedback is tied to a specific answer from students and is only displayed to students who have selected that answer. Because of this specificity it is an option for only certain question types.

You may want to use this a highlight a misconception that a question was designed to catch. You might also link to resources where that answer was discussed.

GIFT format

One advantage for specific feedback is the ability to build it into your questions as you develop them with GIFT format. If you use that code you may be used to the ~ = and {}’s as symbols that do things in GIFT format, but one you may not know about is #. With the # any text after that will be turned into specific feedback for that correct answer. As an example:

What colour is Clifford the big dog?

{~Blue

~Yellow

=Red#Correct!

~Green}

If you have any questions about building these types of feedback into your quiz, please contact moodle@upei.ca