Assessment and feedback is at the heart of the student experience, shaping students' understanding of the curriculum and influencing student progress on the programme and career choices. Assessment also forms a significant part of workload for academics and administrators and yet is an area that is often rated unsatisfactory by students (JISC, 2010).
Moodle provides a range of options to support diagnostic, summative and formative assessment.
Using technology can bring many benefits to the assessment process and some of these are outlined below:
There are three separate assignment activities in Moodle:
Assignment activities in Moodle enable students to submit their coursework as a file upload or online text and allows the Lecturer to assess, grade and provide feedback. For Moodle and Turnitin assignments, it is possible to set students a timed assignment.
Assignment activities can be set up for diagnostic, formative and summative assessments.
Peer assessment is the assessment of students' work by their peers against set assessment criteria. By assessing or evaluating each other’s work, students take up the role of appraisers and, over time, acquire the skills they need to make judgements on their own work. In general, there are two types of peer assessments:
Self-assessment may be included as part of peer assessment. Self-assessment requires students to reflect on their own work and judge how well they have performed in relation to the assessment criteria. Developing reflective skills provides students with the ability to consider their own performance and to identify their strengths, weaknesses, and areas that require improvement. Students can then to use this knowledge to influence their future work, whether on a programme of study or in employment.
Moodle has two peer assessment activities and also the Database and Forum activity which can be used to support Peer Assessment. Our Peer Assessment guide outlines the functionality of each activity to help you select a tool that meets your requirements.
The Quiz activity allows you to design and build quizzes consisting of a large variety of question types, including multiple choice, true-false, short answer and essay-style questions. Questions are stored in the Question Bank and can be re-used in quizzes in different modules.
Quiz can help to build students’ confidence by providing opportunities for them to consolidate their learning, and offering instant personalised feedback.
Lecturers can also benefit from using quizzes to identify parts of the curriculum that students are struggling with, and to gather feedback about content covered in lectures.
You can use Quiz to support diagnostic and formative assessment as well as summative exams. Turnitin can be enabled for essay-style questions.
The Forum activity allows students and lecturers to exchange ideas by posting comments as part of a 'thread'.
A Forum can be used for formative and summative assessments that require students to communicate, collaborate, debate or critique.
A wiki is a collaboratively designed webpage or series of webpages. Each time a person makes changes to a wiki page, their revision of the content becomes the current version, and an older version is stored. Edits can be reverted if necessary.
Wikis can be used for formative and summative assessments that require students to collaborate and co-create content.
To support students with online assessment:
