One of the best uses for the Moodle Quiz activity is to provide learners with an opportunity to practice with immediate feedback, on their own schedules. In order to configure automated feedback, you will need to be able to anticipate learner responses. This can be done with “forced-choice” question types, such as multiple choice, matching, true-false, and numerical questions. There is also some limited ability to provide feedback with short-answer question types.
How-To Steps
Create a Quiz, then begin by editing the settings. For practices with feedback, two particular Quiz Settings areas are of interest.
- Question Behavior: This section allows you to define what will happen after the student answers each question. By default, the behavior is set to “Deferred Feedback,” which requires the student to submit the entire quiz before providing any feedback. Other choices include “Adaptive Mode,” which allows the student to attempt each question multiple times, with hints if configured, before moving on to the next question, and Interactive and Immediate modes, which provide a grade when each individual question is submitted. (Interactive mode allows the student to “Try again” if they get a question wrong, up to the limit set for attempts.) “CBM” stants for “Certainty-Based Marking”, which asks the student how certain they are of the answer. The certainty is factored into the grading– greater certainty affects a grade more.
- Review Options: These parameters allow you to configure what information is provided to the learner when feedback is provided.
After you have saved the Quiz Settings, click Add and then choose from the menu:
- Choose your question type. Here, we are selecting Multiple Choice, but the process is very similar for other question types (except Short Answer and Essay).
- Select a question bank category, if appropriate (e.g. the objective this question relates to), and give your question a display name. This name will not be visible to the students. It is only used by the instructor while editing quizzes. Enter your question prompt (which may include media), and set the number of points this question will be worth (the “Default mark”).
- (Optional) Next, provide “General feedback,” the text or images you will display to the learner after they have answered the question. This text will be displayed to the learner regardless of whether or not they answered the question correctly. One simple way to provide feedback is to enter the correct answer here and not provide more specific feedback, though this is not as helpful to the learner as feedback specific to the response.
- These options are specific to Multiple Choice questions, and these default settings usually work well:
- For each “choice,” define the text and/or images that will display to the student, and then configure the option to provide the score and feedback for that specific option. Here, the first choice is the correct one. This is acceptable because we have configured this question to “shuffle the choices,” so we don’t need to worry about the order in which they are entered.
- Repeat step 6 for each distractor. It can be very helpful if each distractor represents a specific error you anticipate students may make. You may wish to offer a hint, if students can re-take the quiz or change their answers, or provide the correct answer and show how it is derived if only one quiz submission is allowed.
- As part of the question configuration, you can also provide “Combined feedback” for any correct, partially correct, or incorrect response to the question.
- Optionally, you can set a penalty for each incorrect attempt at the question, with hints to be displayed after each attempt.
