Pre-Assessment with Moodle Quizzes
Typically we think of quizzes as check-ins and endings to instruction, however assessments can be powerful tools to lead into assessments. Conducting a pre-assessment might help you gauge what your students know, think they know, or know they don’t know before the class has really even begun. Pre-assessments can help you establish where students are at and inform you about the biases or misconceptions that may need addressing to allow for deeper learning.
In classes these tools can have a variety of forms from thumbs up/down responses, ticket-out-the-door, or topic arranging. The option we’ll focus on for today is a Moodle quiz used as a formative assessment.
Moodle quizzes are often used for graded assessments such as unit quizzes, midterms, and final examinations, but they don’t have to be worth marks. The tool itself gives instructors a variety of question types that can be used to assess what students know going into the class, this might something as simple as short answer questions conducted through the essay format, select answer responses to check for misconceptions using multiple choice, true/false, or matching formats, or some of the drag and drop question formats.
Since this assessment happens before students would engage with the course learning on the topic this would generally be an ungraded test. In Moodle you can make a quiz ungraded by giving it a maximum grade of 0 on the Edit Quiz page
For this test you can leave grades on the individual questions since the maximum grade is 0, you won’t need to worry about changing weighting on individual questions or making all questions worth 0 as well.
The real strength for Moodle as a tool for pre-assessment can be its statistics. After the quiz is complete you can check the statistics on a per-question level to see which questions have given students the most difficulty, on the quiz statistics page that measure is the facility index where Moodle reports the percentage of students who got a full score on that individual question.
For multiple choice questions you can see the number of students that responded for each answer, letting you know whether there is a particular misconception that is catching a number of students in the course.
If you’re interested in learning more about quiz statistics you can check out our post on What do Moodle quiz statistics mean?
If you’re interested in using Moodle quizzes or other activities to conduct pre-assessments in your course but you need a hand please contact us at moodle@upei.ca
