Sarah Slade

In week 6 of the Technology Enhanced Learning course, we’ve been learning about assessments, in particular:

• Multiple choice questions (or MCQs if you’re an ID)
• Peer assessment
• e-portfolios (there’s a habit of putting e- in front of things here…I don’t like it)

Not quite onto e-portfolios yet, so I’ll save that for another post.

I was surprised by the number of ways you can use MCQs in assessment. Research has been done around electronic voting systems that allow instant assessment in classroom or webinar situations – I’ve always thought of that as polling, but you could do a bit of elegant design on an Adobe Connect or Webex poll to get a similar effect. The key seems to be (as it nearly always is in TEL) with the way the questions are designed.

For example, you could use a brain-teaser as a formative question, asking students to discuss their answers before voting.

The circumference of the Earth is approximately 40,000 km. If we made a circle of wire around the globe, that is only 10 meters (0.01 km) longer than the circumference of the globe, could a flea, a mouse, or even a man creep under it?

A. Flea

B. Mouse

C. Man (about 165cm in height)

http://brainden.com/cool-math-games.htm

Formative MCQs could be used as icebreakers, or to identify possible knowledge gaps and areas to concentrate on before the session.

Confidence-based marking

Bush (2001) researched another imaginative use of MCQs, confidence-based marking. Give students a set number of points for each question. If we take a look at our brain-teaser again, we could assign each student 6 points. Then we ask them to distribute their points on the answers they’re most confident with. So an un-confident student may hedge their bets and put 2 each on A, B and C. A more confident student might put all 6 points on C. Wrong answers would lose them points, so the most the un-confident student will get will be 2 points.

You could then expand on the answers, asking students why they chose A, B, or C, and what makes them so confident (or un-confident), using it as a way in to discuss measuring circumference, average heights of mice, or the volume of metal required to make a massive wire and the diplomatic/logistic/environmental implications of such an exercise. /

Create your own quiz

Another summative approach would be to have students working in groups to create their own pub quiz on the topic, which they then post for their peers. There is a bit of to and fro in this one, but it may work nicely as an end-of-day assessment. They could be marked on question quality and structure, quality of answers and feedback.

Or you could go the whole hog and get the other students to vote on the best quizzer.

Will now get on to write the post I originally logged on to do…

Answer: C