Assessing Student Learning with Core Moodle Tools

Assessment and feedback are critical to teaching and learning. Low-stakes assessments can be “formative,” meaning they administered before or during the learning process to guide your teaching or help learners monitor their progress. A major assessment like an exam or project may be used in a “summative” way at the end of a module or unit to measure how well learners have mastered the topic. Moodle has several built-in tools you can use to assess student learning.

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Best Practices

1. Align your assessments with your learning objectives

To think about alignment, consider the following:

  • Could learners explain a concept through answering a multiple choice quiz?
  • Would learners’ ability to design an experiment be an appropriate measure of whether they can list the steps of the scientific method?
  • Can a matching question show you whether students can define the branches of government?

The answer to each of these questions is “No!” In these examples, the stated learning objective and the assessment are not in alignment. Identifying the action verb in the learning objective and the action verb for the assessment is a good way to confirm alignment.

  • Multiple-choice questions are good for testing the ability to identify a correct answer out of several options. A better assessment of the ability to explain would be a long-answer question.
  • Designing is a higher-order thinking skill than listing. A better assessment would be simply to ask learners to list the steps. Lower-level learning objectives (remembering, comprehending) should not be assessed by asking learners to perform higher level tasks (applying, analyzing, evaluating, creating).
  • Matching questions test the ability to identify the correct definition. A better assessment to measure the ability to define would be a long-answer question.

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2. Include a variety of assessments in your course

Some students will perform better on some types of assessments better than others due to the nature of the assessment. If something about the nature of the assessment poses a barrier for students, then their performance might not be reflective of their level of mastery. For instance, if timed exams cause a student a lot of anxiety, they may perform less well on that sort of assessment than on a take-home exam, project or paper that measures the same learning.

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3. Choose an assessment type that is appropriate for your goals

The three types of Moodle assessment tools that will be discussed in this article are Quiz, Assignment and Forum. Use the information below, about each, to select an appropriate tool for your assessment.

Core Moodle Assessment Tools

Moodle Quiz

Quizzes in Moodle offer many question types from multiple choice, matching, true/false and other auto-graded question types, to long answer questions that must be manually graded. They are appropriate for anything from self-checks to final exams. Settings allow you to designate a time limit on an attempt, the number of attempts a student can make, how and when they receive feedback and more.

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Moodle Assignment

Moodle’s Assignment tool allows you to create a space for students to turn in their work, whether it be a paper, project, or more. A variety of file types can be submitted, or you can allow students to enter text directly into the assignment activity. Assignments are graded manually. The grading interface allows you to annotate on students’ papers and create/use a rubric or grading guide to score students’ work.

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Moodle Forum

In Moodle Forums, students create posts and read and respond to other students’ posts. Forums are graded manually. They are especially good to use when students will have varying answers to the prompt, because then they will learn the most from each others’ perspectives on the issue. If they are likely to have the same answer, you may choose to use Assignment instead. Forums can be very effective for hosting debates.

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