The Quiz module is a robust activity that can offer a lot of educational value beyond simply assessing the level of understanding a learner has achieved in a course.
In this article we will see how you can use the Moodle Quiz for formative and summative assessments.
Quiz for Formative Assessments
Formative assessments, or assessments for learning, help learners and educators adjust instruction to keep learners on track for learning objectives. A practice quiz is an example of a formative assessment.
5 Steps to Setting up the Quiz as a Formative Assessment:
- Interactive with multiple tries
In the quiz settings, go to the Question behaviour section and in the How questions behave field, select Interactive with multiple tries from the dropdown menu.
- Review options
For this to really work, you need to show the learner whether or not they got the answer correct. You may also want to show Specific Feedback (see #3).
- Specific Feedback (optional)
When setting up each question in this type of quiz, you will probably want to guide your learner with the Specific Feedback feature. When building out your questions (i.e., multichoice) you can add feedback to each answer choice:
- Hints
Hints are tied to the Interactive with multiple tries setting and you can add them at the bottom of the question editing page. There is space for 3 hints (three tries). You can add more hints to add more tries.
- Access to additional study material (optional)
To really help out learners, you can add additional study materials and restrict them against a grade on the quiz. Use the Restrict access feature with your additional study material and restrict it against a lower grade. If you click the eye icon to hide, then learners in the course won’t see this additional study guide unless they ‘fail’ the learning assessment.
This is what the learner sees:
When a learner moves through the learning assessment, they will be able to click a Check button to see if their answer is correct:
This shows both the Specific feedback (embedded with the answer option chosen) and the hint (above the Try again button).
Quiz for Summative Assessments
Summative assessments, or assessments of learning, are usually done at the end of a lesson or module or course and is usually done against a standard or benchmark. A final exam would be a good example of a summative assessments.
5 Steps to Setting up the Quiz as a Summative Assessment:
- Timing
You can determine the timing of your exam, from they date to how long the learner has to complete it. You can use one or a combination of these settings, or none of them, depending on how strict you need to be. In this example, I've set the time date of the exam to one specific day, and the time of the exam to one hour.
- Grade to pass
Setting a grade to pass allows you to set the completion criteria against a passing grade. The Moodle default quiz score is out of 10, so here, the learner must get 85% to successfully complete the quiz.
- Attempts
You can determine how many times you want a user to be able to take a quiz. Here, the attempts are set to a maximum of 2.
- Deferred Feedback & Review Settings
With a summative assessment, you will probably want the learner to complete the exam before receiving feedback. Select Deferred Feedback in the Question behaviour section.
In conjunction with this setting, you may want to consider the review options. If you are allowing your learners multiple attempts, then you may want to restrict their ability to see the right answer. This is done in the Review options section.
- Activity Completion
You'll also want to set up Activity completion so that you have tracking and reporting on exam completion. Since this is a final exam, I want to ensure that the learner has either met the passing grade or all of their attempts.
If a learner doesn't meet the passing grade but completes all their attempts, then they will receive a red cross on the Moodle Activity completion report. For example, here we see a learner who has failed to achieve the passing grade but has completed all the attempts (red "x") and a learner who has achieved the passing grade: