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 (or what)?
• What initiates the lifecycle of an exam?

Mack Marketing

Mack is a marketing teacher. He likes golf, but not on rainy days. He also teaches online a bit, but mostly he has normal classes. In addition to regular, time-limited exams, he also uses take-home exams (with deadlines for the questions/case assignments) and group exams (a group works together on a a case and the work is evaluated).

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. He does not think exams are a very good way of evaluating learning, since they mostly evaluate what students happen to remember. And even though he considers grading essay answers an extra workload, he still sees this as the only way to effectively evaluate students' conceptual understanding, especially on his basic courses where there are more students.

He uses quite similar exams on different courses, our focus is on a Introduction to Marketing exam, which is about:

• Evaluating conceptual learning; can apply what they have learned to real-life cases
• Essay questions
• Qualitative feedback; using templates as basis

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.

Hypothesis: Since his exams are so specialized, Mack is afraid that if another teacher takes up his courses, that teacher will not understand all the nuances he has taken into account while designing his exams. That is why he writes notes about each exam whole and archives these notes that explain the choices he has made in the exam design.

Ida Informatics

Ida 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 Mack's essay questions for testing conceptual understanding).

Ida 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. She does not think exams have any pedagogical purpose, and would actually rather not even grade her students, but since the educational system demands comparable grades, she does it this way.

(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.)

Harvey Historian

Harvey 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.

Sometimes Harvey also takes a year off, and the exam bank is an excellent resource for a less experienced teacher to refer to for finding out what is essential to teach about a course.

Fred

We are still missing quite a few details about Fred. If you are or know a Fred, please tell us about him.

Fred is an teacher of an advanced computer sciences course. Several other courses are prerequirements for his course.

Fred's exams are:

• Evaluating the starting level of the students on his course; formative assessment of understanding of the meaning of basic concepts
• 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.

Susan Support

Susan works in the IT support of her school. She does introductory lectures about Moodle and other learning environments. She also tutors teachers hand-by-hand, and the drill is roughly as follows:

• Explain basic principles of Quiz
• Go through the help material
• Teach the question bank separately at first, before looking at the Quiz, it is easier to digest this way (Since Moodle 1.6)
• Make an sample exam

Grace Grader

Is a trainee and only does grading according to instructions.