Development:Quiz UI redesign scenarios - 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 process:

• 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

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, the exam is a pedagogical tool and he does not need the exam results to be 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 teaches informatics. Her teaching responsibilities include lecturing a course of basic information retrieval to 200 first year students each semester. She sees exams beneficial since they provide measurable grounds on which to compare and grade learning on a numerical 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 gradable question types. She thinks automatically graded questions, such as multiple questions, suffice well enough for testing

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.

Exams can be covered simply a testing tool or also a pedagogical tool – in the latter case, the feedback – written, oral, and possibly interactive – provided to students plays a key role.

However, pedagogically they can be thought to be too...