What is the Quiz activity in Moodle?
The Moodle Quiz activity is a powerful tool that allows you to use various question types for formative and summative assessments (such as in-class tests or formal exams) where you can test the knowledge of your students to get a better understanding of what they learned or where the gaps can be found. For formative assessments and in-class tests, you could use, for example:
- Multiple Choice,
- Drag and Drop,
- Essay,
- Short Answer,
- Matching,
- True/False,
- and many more.
In addition to the various question types, Moodle also allows you to add images, sound, or other media types to your questions.
Please note, for formal exams, we currently only recommend using the Multiple Choice question type.
Moodle Academy – pedagogical aspects of Quiz questions in Moodle
The Education Manager (Mary Cooch) and Education Advisor (Anna Krass) recently held a webinar session about the pedagogical aspects of creating and using Quiz questions in Moodle. In addition to sharing best practices, tips, and traps around building Multiple Choice questions which we will discuss below in more detail, they also highlighted that currently, the most popular question types in Moodle are the following ones in this specific order:
- Multiple Choice
- Matching
- True or False
- Short Answer
However, they also highlighted the fact that educators need to carefully consider what question types they would use for a quiz to test student knowledge as it has to align with the learning outcomes, therefore, they need to think about the:
- purpose to use a question type,
- advantages and disadvantages of each question type, just as
- question behaviors to use during a test.
Traps – What to avoid?
Make sure your grammar does not give away the correct answer.
Although in most languages, the following issue is not a problem, in English, there are some grammar traps that need to be avoided to make sure students cannot guess the correct answer. This can happen when; finishing a question with the word ‘a’ or ‘an’ as in this case, it indicates the correct answer as it has to start with a vowel (‘oss rowd’) which would exclude all the other answer choices (‘road’, ‘way’ and ‘stray’).
Example
Make sure your enthusiasm to give extra information does not give away the correct answer.
Another trap we recommend paying attention to, is avoiding extra explanation in the question, for enthusiasm reasons, that would give away the correct answer to students. In this case, the question indicates that the correct answer must be a word (‘Tay’) rather than words, which then excludes all the other answer choices (‘It int’, ‘It snot’, and ‘It wor’).
Example
Avoid asking a later question that was answered by an earlier question.
On some occasions, it is advised to make sure that by providing feedback to students or answering an earlier question, it does not give away the correct answer (‘oss’) for a later question, therefore, we recommend carefully mapping out the questions to make sure there are no overlaps.
Example
Avoid obviously incorrect or joke answers, and avoid absolute statements (such as always, never, ever).
We also recommend making sure to avoid using absolute statements, such as never, ever, and always, as things are rarely absolute. Just as it is advised to avoid obviously incorrect (‘Nobody ever speaks it anymore’ and ‘Old people always speak it’) or joke answers (‘Mr. Bean lol’) as it will make it easier for students to guess the correct answer (‘Usually older people’).
Example
Avoid ambiguous and trick questions.
On rare occasions, it can happen that the question and answer choices are ambiguous or tricky. It can appear that students are presented with multiple correct answers (‘In the West Midlands area of Britain’ and ‘In the center of England around Birmingham’), however, only one can be selected.
Example
Avoid negatives in the questions and answers.
We would also recommend avoiding negatives in the questions and answers as they can be confusing, while the main goal is to not trick students but to make sure you can objectively test their knowledge. It can be difficult for students to convert these negatives into affirmatives to understand the meaning of the answer choices, especially, if we are talking about international students whose native language might not be English.
Example
Use language and terms your students will understand: Avoid slang and unnecessarily complex language, and avoid abbreviations if they are unknown or provide the full form.
The following question represents abbreviations the students might not be familiar with, such as:
- BCD (Black Country Dialect)
- PIE (Proto-Indo-European)
- AS (Anglo-Saxon), OE (Old English)
- NF (Norman French)
It also includes languages and terms we would not recommend using, such as whence as it is not part of the standard English that should be used in education.
Example
As a result, we would recommend avoiding these traps, however, if you would like to use shorter forms, then please make sure you include the full form as well, as shown above.
Tips – What to use?
Shuffle the answer choices as well as the questions (if appropriate), or list options logically or alphabetically.
You could either shuffle the questions and the answer choices (if appropriate) or otherwise, we would recommend listing them logically or alphabetically, depending on the fact which would be more appropriate and easier to understand for the students.
Please do not use answer choices, such as ‘all of the above’, ‘all of the below’, etc, in case you randomise/shuffle the order.
Example
Example
Do not use more than three answer choices under each question.
Even though using three answer choices is not a golden rule, research seems to show that when it comes to Multiple Choice questions, the recommended distractors should be two, whilst the correct answer should be one as having more than three answer choices will not significantly change or affect the outcome as the impact on students is not noticeable.
However, you can stay with four answer choices if you prefer that way as most educators do. This was also confirmed by the Moodle Educational Manager (Mary Cooch) during the webinar session.
Avoid controversial or ambiguous answers.
Another tip to consider is avoiding controversial or ambiguous answer choices, as it might trick students and therefore, they will unable to answer the questions correctly. The main goal always should be objectively testing their knowledge to get a better understanding of what they learned and where the gaps can be found.
Example
Match the questions with your learning outcomes – no unnecessary extra questions.
Usually, at the end of the test, you might run out of questions, but you would like to make sure it adds up to 100 marks/points. This can then cause difficulties in terms of coming up with a few more questions, and as such, you might create questions that are irrelevant as they are not matching/are aligned with the learning objectives.
As a result, we would recommend mapping out your questions before building them into a Moodle Quiz to make sure you prevent this from happening.
Think about Certainty-based marking if useful to you.
Sometimes, it can be also useful to use ‘Certainty-based’ marking which in addition to answering questions as students, they would also require to select a scale about how sure they are about their selected answers. This might be useful for them as they would also get direct feedback from Moodle, where they can review their confidence in their knowledge.
As such, in these cases, students would get two separate marks – one for the correct/incorrect answers and another one about their certainty which then would result in the final grade. For more information about this question behavior, please visit the following supporting material.
In Conclusion
The Moodle Quiz activity is a powerful tool that allows you to use various question types for formative and summative assessments to test student knowledge and as such, to get a better understanding of what they learned or where the gaps can be found.
Therefore, planning your questions carefully is a big part of this process as they have to align with the learning objectives, but it is also recommended to pay great attention to the purpose to use a question type, the advantages and disadvantages of each of them, just as the question behaviors to use during a quiz.
In the same way, it is also essential to make sure you avoid traps (such as too much information or grammar hints in the questions, or ambiguous and negative phrases) and to use tips (such as using the appropriate shuffling for the answer choices) to create high-quality quizzes where the student knowledge would be objectively tested and graded.