Quiz UI redesign scenarios - Background
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Background/Personas
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
Jack is a marketing teacher. He likes golf, but not on rainy days. He does a lot of exams which are quite similar, but we are going to focus on a Introduction to Marketing exam, which is about:
- Evaluating conceptual learning
- Essay questions
- Qualitative feedback; using templates as basis
While defining the goals of his course, he ends up with the conclusion 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, especially on his basic courses where there are more students.
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
Mary is a teacher in her fifties, still likes teaching but is more-or-less secretly already anticipating her retirement. She teaches informatics. Her teaching responsibilities include lecturing a couple of basic courses with dozens or even some hundreds of students at a time.
A lot of her time is spent planning a course of basic information retrieval to 200 first year students each semester. The exam is about:
- Evaluating learning of basic factual knowledge of her field
- Multiple choice questions
- for testing students' basic factual knowledge of her field automatically graded questions, such as multiple questions, suffice well enough (versus Jack's essay questions for testing 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.)
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.
Jeff
Jeff is a history professor in a university. He mostly concentrates on his research, but also does some teaching of basic courses he knows by heart, since he has been doing it for a couple of decades. He uses exams to test the students' understanding of specific eras from different points of view, and students' ability to see the connections between different events in history.
