This is a form of assessment where students are presented with a range of questions either formatively or summativley. A range of question types can be incorporated such as MCQ’s, pictures and short answer questions.
Advantages & Challenges
Advantages
Challenges
Advantages
Useful to engage and motivate students, to gauge students’ understanding or to reinforce learning.
Can be used to provide formative, contextualised and instant feedback on topic areas.
Suitable for use with large class sizes
For online quizzes, there can be time savings as question banks can be built-up over time and reused. Also, depending on the question type, feedback and grade provision can be automated. For students, they may offer the flexibility to take the online quiz remotely and at a time that suits them.
Challenges
Creating quizzes or any series of short exercises takes time, especially in the early phase of development.
With online quizzes it may be difficult to ensure academic integrity particularly when reusing question sets with multiple cohorts.
Online quizzes/short exercises rely on students having access to technology and a reliable internet connection to complete.
Certain types of quizzes may not be suitable for all disciplines particularly where there is not a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer.
Short exercises can be challenging for students who struggle to synthesize information.
Tips for Use
Provide students with clear instructions on the format and the timeframe that they must complete the quiz/short exercises.
Let students know the digital equipment/tools they need access to and if the assessment will be available to them remotely and or in an on-campus environment.
Ideally allow them a ‘practice run’ in advance of the quiz/short exercise, where they will complete and submit following the same instructions as you intend to provide on the day.
If running an online quiz, consider creating a bank of different questions. By doing this you could give different students a different bank of questions of have the questions randomised through your VLE.
