Student Quiz Creation

Overview

In this chapter let’s discuss how to allow your students to create quiz questions that you can then reuse for formative self-checks or in the summative sections in your final exam.

Benefits

1. Students are more likely to analyze and read the text critically.
2. To be able to create a question (multiple-choice, true/false, matching), you need a stem, distractors, and correct answers. This can’t be done correctly unless the students understand the content.
3. The question bank is constantly evolving and less cognitive load on your question creation skills.
4. Easily reuse, rotate, and mix-match questions from semester to semester.
5. Students may surprise you can create challenging but effective questions.

Moodle

There are different Moodle Plugins that an administrator can add that provide student quiz creation activities. Here is one for reference: StudentQuiz Activity. Instead of spending time convincing your Moodle admin to add this plugin. Let me tell you a strategy that’s already built into Moodle. For reference, this feature is called locally assigned roles. It allows you to give students a teacher or editing role for just that activity.

All you need to do is go to the desired activity, click on the activities’ gear icon, and select “Locally assigned roles”. You’ll see a list of the different roles you can assign (roles higher on the list have the most permissions). Once you select a role, you will see two boxes one with existing users the other with potential users. In the potential user’s box select the specific students (by holding the ctrl/cmd key, you can select more than one student at a time). Then click the add button. You can use the breadcrumbs/site links to leave the page. Now those users have a specific role.

Here is a list of roles in Moodle ISU:

• Teacher – This role has full editing rights and will be listed as the teacher in the course for students.

• Unlisted Teacher – This is a teacher who has access like a regular teacher with full-editing rights, but will not be listed as a teacher in the course for students.

• Non-Editing Teacher – Non-editing teachers can teach in courses and grade students in activities and the grade book, but do not have permission to add, remove, or edit course materials.

• Student – You can use this role to grant access to course materials to a non-registered user. Users in this role will have the same privileges as registered students.

• Student with Incomplete – You can assign this role to students that need access to the course outside of the regular term limit.

In our use case will use the unlisted teacher role; we can create a Moodle quiz and give select students the unlisted teacher role. Be assured even though you give students an editing role it only affects the single activity. They won’t have access to the grade book to see other student grades. What they will be able to do is go to the question bank in Moodle or the edit quiz page in the quiz and start using any of the question types that are available. In our instance of Moodle we have the following question types:

• Multiple choice*
• True/False*
• Matching*
• Short answer (one question / one answer)*
• Numerical (one question / one answer)*
• Essay (one question / multiple answers)
• All-or-nothing multiple choice (no partial credit)
• Calculated
• Calculated multichoice
• Calculated simple
• Drag and Drop into text
• Drage and Drop onto image
• Embedded answer (Cloze)
• Random short-answer matching
• Select missing words

*Recommended for beginners.

All questions can be set up with auto-grading except for the essay. This gives you and your students a variety of different strategies to create questions. Also, Moodle will keep track of when a question was originally created and when it was last modified.

Another option, in our specific Moodle LMS, we have created a custom role Quiz Question Creator with the proper permissions to make students successful at creating creations. Here are specific resources that were created:

• Quiz Question Creation Activity [Faculty]
• Quiz Question Creation Activity [Students]

Recommendations

1. Require students as they begin creating questions that they include a reference in the general feedback of where the correct answer in the text is (ie section title and page number).
2. Based on class-size, it may work better to put students into groups and for a specific module, you assign one group to be the quiz creators for that unit. This limits the number of quiz questions you need to review.
3. Setup a pacing guide. for example, Students should be reading the material and have their questions completed by Tuesday. Take Wednesday to review the questions (check for accuracy, duplication, etc). Allow for Thursday for any remediation. Then by Friday administer the quiz (be sure to remove the editing role from students once the quiz goes live).
4. It may be helpful to setup question type limits, (ie 5 Multiple choice, 4 True/False, 1 Matching, etc). Or discourage the use of more complex or manually graded question types.
5. Enable a Start / End date so while student creators are working they are only able to preview the quiz not submit an attempt.