A few years ago I was influenced by a story I heard of a professor who worked hard to prevent cheating online. He created a huge test bank of hundreds of questions, from which the software selected for each quiz. One day, after adding another bunch of questions to the test bank, he found a printout containing single question (including those he’d just added) left in his classroom by a student. At first he was furious, then he decided that if a student was going to study the entire bank of almost 1,000 questions to pass his tests, they were studying anyway and what the hell.
Last semester I began making “PreQuizzes”, repeatable no-grade quizzes containing all the multiple-choice questions that would be on the real quiz. (My quizzes are 70% multiple-choice and 30% writing questions — I figure 70% is a C and if you can only answer factual questions in history that is C-level performance.) I set the software (first Blackboard and now Moodle) to not let them see the answers, just the final score, thinking if they had to take it repeatedly without knowing which ones they missed, they’d have to study harder!
Last night a student IM’d me. She said why didn’t PreQuiz #2 let her see her answers, like in PreQuiz #1? We discovered that I had accidentally set PreQuiz #1 in “adaptive mode” (I’m new at Moodle), which lets students answer each question individually, then click Submit to find out instantly whether they got that question right. They could immediately try again for a right answer. She said it had been very helpful!
My first thought was, “Yeah, I’ll bet!” That was not what I had in mind. I told her that, and she said, oh, but it had been so helpful to her to be able to look things up one at a time. She’s a good student. I asked her, if I did them all that way, wouldn’t in make the students lazy? She said, yes, the lazy ones, she wasn’t going to lie. I thought about it while she chatted with others (she carries 19 units and lives online), then decided, what the hell. All the PreQuizzes are now adaptive mode, with bunches of questions, and we’ll see how it goes!
My decision is based on current research involving quizzes as learning, which integrate assessment with the class instead of having it represent an end to learning (see in-class example). This is an important point, since MiraCosta and many other colleges are formulating Outcomes and Assessment plans to cater to results-oriented environments of accountability (such as state legislatures). Many of us learned in our own education that “the test” is the end result of studying a particular topic, and many of us discovered that we forgot the material as soon as we took the test, yet we still push this method.
To use the current edu-speak lingo, we could replace such “summative assessments” with “formative assessments” (see Penn State article).
In an online environment, immediate feedback has a role that is increasingly being recognized as crucial. At a recent conference, I learned that the high speed of broadband increases student frustration, because they see the internet as instant. They no longer go get a cup of coffee while waiting for something to download. When they don’t get an “instant” result (or an instant solution to their technical problem, email, whatever), frustration skyrockets at a much faster rate.
Perhaps my PreQuizzes will solve several problems: they provide instant feedback for every question (reducing frustration), integrate assessment into the learning process, and still force them to study bunches of questions if they haven’t done the reading fully. Maybe they’ll even drink less coffee!
