I’m still thinking about guidelines for checking questions. Except this is a guideline for what not to do…<\/p>\n
My husband has been checking some Moodle questions for colleagues today and has mentioned two things to me. First of all he told me that when he’s checking the questions there’s a ‘helpful’ button he can press to\u00a0reveal the correct answer. I’m sure it is meant to be helpful. But if we want the best questions for our students, I’m afraid I don’t think this is it. It encourages checkers to be lazy\u00a0and to\u00a0just check that the question ‘seems right’. Maybe I’m being mean, but I’d prefer checkers to be forced to attempt all questions as if they were a student.<\/p>\n
The second thing Richard told me was about a problem he’d found in a particular question – and I doubt he’d have found it if he’d used the ‘helpful button’. I suspect that the question author has done just that. It’s a drag and drop question where you have to fill in the blanks in a sentence. The problem is that, unless you are being incredibly pedantic, some of the\u00a0dragable terms meant\u00a0as an option for one place in the sentence are \u00a0interchangeable with those meant for elsewhere, and if you get the wrong one\u00a0e.g. ‘lower than’\u00a0instead\u00a0of\u00a0 ‘less than’ you get marked wrong, with no targeted feedback. This is the sort of thing that gives interactive computer-marked assessment a bad name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m still thinking about guidelines for checking questions. Except this is a guideline for what not to do… My husband has been checking some Moodle questions for colleagues today and has mentioned two things to me. First of all he … Continue reading