Quiz UI redesign scenarios - Background
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Quiz/Exam building - background
An exam can be used at the beginning of a course to evaluate the initial level of the students' understanding, during the course to provide checkpoints for students, or at the end of the course.
Key questions for this part of the exam making:
- What are the pedagogigal goals for the teacher?
- Does the exam use essay questions or automatically evaluated?
- What initiates the lifecycle of an exam?
Jack
- Evaluate conceptual learning
- Essay questions
- Qualitative feedback; using templates as basis
Jack is a marketing teacher. He defines the goals of a course and determines that an exam with essay questions is needed at the end of the course for evaluating students' learning.
Although he considers grading essay answers an extra workload, he sees this as the only way to effectively evaluate students' conceptual understanding.
He plans to give feedback about students' answers: for him, this enables the exam to work as a pedagogical tool and he does not require the exam results to be absolutely comparable with the exam results of courses of previous semesters. He uses some templates for feedback, and based on that he then writes feedback for each student personally.
Mary
- Evaluate learning of basic factual knowledge of her field
- Multiple choice questions
Mary teaches informatics. Her teaching responsibilities include lecturing
- a course of basic information retrieval
- to 200 first year students
- each semester.
- She thinks automatically graded questions, such as multiple questions, suffice well enough for testing students' basic factual knowledge of her field (versus Jack's conceptual understanding).
She sees exams beneficial since they provide measurable grounds on which to compare and grade learning on a numerical (quantitative) scale. She wants to have her exam as automated as possible. In an ideal world, she would instantly start using a tool that would analyze her course material automatically, generate essay questions and then even grade them using linguistic analysis or some other method. Her exams use multiple choice and other automatically gradeable question types.
Fred
- Evaluate the starting level of the students on his course
- Multiple choice
Fred uses an exam at the beginning of a course to evaluate the starting level for his students. Some students are given a grade for the whole course just for the exam if they do well enough.
