Assessing Student Work

Assignments and Quizzes in Online Learning

Teachers have a choice to make when they want students to demonstrate what they have learned in a one-to-one fashion. They can construct an assignment or a quiz/test. These are both assessment tools which are seen only by the teacher and the student, but they have very different functions.

The assignment is poorly named because some students use “assignments” as any activity that they are required to do for a grade. However, in Moodle, Blackboard and other Course Management Systems (CMS)  the “assignment” has a different meaning.  It means that students submit text answer to questions. This function is ideal for papers or essays. It really isn't suitable, despite its name, for short answer questions. Since other students cannot see work submitted it is not useful for discussions.

To me, the Quiz tools should be used for mostly formative evaluation unless there is a need for mathematical operations. I pick questions that the computer can grade, and often, if the information is important, I let the student retake. I like the feature to scramble question order, and if I use multiple choice, I also use scrambling the order in which the choices are presented provided that one of the choices is NOT “all of the above.” I think the quiz feature does not do a good job with fill in the blank or essay questions, and I do not use them.I use multiple choice, True False, and matching. There are other types of questions such as the "hot spot' in Blackbord that may be appropriate in certain circumstances.