TIPS AND TRICKS FOR USING QUIZZES IN AN ONLINE ENVIRONMENT
Serves: Instructors
The Quizzes tool can do much more than assess student learning. Using Quizzes, you can encourage increased course participation, give your students opportunities
to practice for upcoming tests and exams, identify potential trouble areas in your quizzes using quiz reports, and gather relevant data to assess your students’ progress. Additionally, using specific quiz strategies and settings when composing quizzes can discourage students from attempting to cheat when taking quizzes online.
Benefits:
• Encourage student participation and course preparation.
• Test students’ knowledge and comprehension of course material.
• Ability to select appropriate quiz settings dependant on the quiz goals and purpose.
• Use quiz settings to prevent cheating efforts.
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
SECTIONS IN THIS RECIPE
Requires your institution to have Learning Environment 10.1
Note: Many of the features described in this recipe can be found in earlier versions of Learning Environment,
but you may not be able to accomplish all tasks in this recipe with older versions.
Going beyond assessment: What can you do with
quizzes?
Quizzes tool added to navbar for easy access from home pages
Quiz composition strategies
Instructors must have Quizzes permissions enabled for their role
Cheating prevention measures
Specific settings in the Quizzes tool
TIPS AND TRICKS FOR USING QUIZZES IN AN ONLINE ENVIRONMENT
Serves: Instructors
GOING BEYOND ASSESSMENT: WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH QUIZZES?
You can expand the purpose of your quizzes to go beyond traditional assessment. Thinking creatively, you can adapt quizzes to suit a variety of purposes.
Encouraging student participation and preparation
You can use quizzes to encourage student participation and preparation in a few
different ways:
• Create quizzes to test required course readings before you cover the material in
class lectures. This encourages students to prepare for class, which in turn, can
increase their in-class participation.
• Create bonus quizzes as incentives for students to go above and beyond in their
course preparation.
Identifying trouble areas
Quizzes should help you identify areas that you need to address further in class,
based on how well students perform on individual questions and quizzes as a whole.
Gathering data on student success
There is a lot of information you can gather from quiz results besides which students
passed the quiz and which students failed. Reports available from inside the Quizzes
tool include:
• Question Statistics: Can include class average, score distribution, bonus questions,
and Out Of value.
Question Statistics report
• Question Details: Can include question difficulty, text responses, bonus questions,
and private section comments.
Reassuring students and letting them practice
• Users Statistics: Can include class average, score distribution, and Org Defined ID.
• Attempt Details: Can include Org Defined ID and attempt durations.
• User Attempts: Can include Org Defined ID.
Note: Additional quiz analysis can be done using Desire2Learn Analytics. See the
Analytics recipe Improve Student Performance Using Desire2Learn Analytics
Quiz Item Analysis Report for more information.
Students can be nervous about taking unit, midterm, and final tests, especially if they are
unfamiliar with your question asking and marking styles. Having weekly or bi-weekly
quizzes can encourage your students to get into the habit of regular study, and make them
feel more confident when it comes time to write a larger test.
In addition, allowing students to practice with previous years’ quizzes can help alleviate
their concerns about quiz setup, and let them focus instead on succeeding in the quiz.
TIPS AND TRICKS FOR USING QUIZZES IN AN ONLINE ENVIRONMENT
Serves: Instructors
QUIZ COMPOSITION STRATEGIES
The intended purpose of your quiz will affect its composition. Consider this: how will your quiz settings differ if your ultimate goal is to assess knowledge versus encourage participation?
Assess knowledge
• Timing: Time limit may be shorter and enforced, with no late submissions allowed.
Encourage participation
• Timing: Time limit may be longer and unenforced, with late submissions allowed.
• Question type: Quiz may contain a wider variety of question types to test student
knowledge in different ways.
• Question type: Quiz may contain more short and long answer questions to encourage
students to respond actively.
• Quiz length: Quiz may be longer as it needs to assess multiple topics from multiple
angles.
• Quiz length: Quiz may only have 1 or 2 questions to make it easier and more convenient for students to participate.
• Availability date: Quiz may be scheduled at the end of the week to cover that week’s
material.
• Availability date: Quiz may be scheduled over multiple days to give students more time
to complete it.
CHEATING PREVENTION MEASURES
Remember! There is no opportunity for clarification if a quiz is taken online, so make sure
the proposed responses to each question are clearly right or wrong, and that the questions
themselves are not ambiguous.
Implement an enforced time limit and
automatically submit quizzes once the
time limit expires.
Randomize the answers in your quiz
questions.
Disable the ability to right-click, send and receive pager messages, and view alerts while
taking quizzes.
Edit the submission view to indicate to students which questions they answered incorrectly, without identifying the correct answers.
TIPS AND TRICKS FOR USING QUIZZES IN AN ONLINE ENVIRONMENT
Serves: Instructors
SPECIFIC SETTINGS IN THE QUIZZES TOOL
There are certain settings you can enable when creating or editing quizzes to make them more effective and efficient.
Questions per page
Break down large quizzes into shorter,
more digestible bits by placing questions
on multiple pages.
Question order
Group your quiz questions by concept.
Switching back and forth between
concepts can be confusing for students.
Automatic export
This setting, when used in conjunction with the
option allow attempt to be set as graded
immediately upon completion, enables autograded attempt scores to be sent directly to the
course grade book.
Automatic grading
Question feedback
This setting allows users to see their scores as soon as they submit their attempts. If you
allow multiple attempts, users can try to best their scores immediately.
Provide contextual clues to help students understand where
they erred. This can help prevent student emails asking why
they got certain questions wrong.
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