Quizzes in an Age of Course Management Software

At the risk of having my edupunk fellow-traveler card revoked, this morning I’m going to cop to using a course management system. Most days, students in my literature classes will have accessed Moodle, and will have taken a multiple-choice quiz on the day’s reading.

This might not seem terribly helpful. The quizzes are open book, and even if they weren’t, they’re administered online, and so students could cheat if they wanted to, and I wouldn’t know. And a multiple-choice reading quiz about, say, In Memoriam is hardly the royal road to critical thinking.

But it turns out that quizzes are locally pretty useful. Students are better prepared when there’s a quiz, and so discussion goes a bit better. Also, in a literature class, the daily quiz offers a way to make sure they’re keeping up with the reading. Even the fact that I tend to write them easy (survey-level quizzes are plot-only; upper-level quizzes focus on the plot but may include slightly more conceptual questions; at both levels I will sometimes include questions of the form, “what would be a good question here?”) helps, because students don’t get all caught up in worrying about them.

The secret sauce to the quizzes is, frankly, the course management system. Here’s why:

• The online delivery means that the quizzes take zero minutes of class time. I usually teach the MWF (50-minute) schedule, and I can’t be wasting time on quizzes.
• The online delivery also means that students can look at the questions before they read, which, if I’ve thought about the questions enough, can help frame the reading a bit.
• Because the quizzes are multiple choice, Moodle grades ‘em. I’ll repeat that: THE CMS GRADES THE QUIZZES! This is awesome for lots of reasons: 1) the student knows, right away, how they’re doing. 2) I know before class starts whether the class has understood the assigned reading. And, 3) I don’t have to grade them. I’m never behind on them.
• It turns out that the quizzes, easy as they are, reductive as they are, do usefully predict student performance. They’re terrible at differentiating between A/B range students, but they do an awesome job at sorting students who are at risk. Over the course of the semester, there are so many questions that if you miss 1 or 2, it’s no big deal. But if you’re *always* missing 2 out of 5 questions, then it will eventually dawn on you that you’re doing D-level work.

I’ve got lots of assignments that reward creativity, rigorous analysis, brisk writing, and so forth–sometimes all at the same time!–but the very banality of the quizzes, perversely enough, makes them helpful. The quizzes help set the expectation that reading is to be done every single day, and I don’t have to publicly embarrass anyone to establish it.

This is the only example I can think of where technology operates as it would have in the future we were promised, where it serves as a automagical labor-reducer. (“You mean, I can give quizzes, and not have to grade them?”) It’s also the only assignment my students perform online that, purely and simply, replicates a pre-Internet activity.

Do you have a daily assignment? Have you figured out a way to automate it? (I gather that in some disciplines you can actually buy question banks. Alas, I have to craft my own questions.) Does it work for you? Is the whole basis of the assignment evil and wrong? Does it matter what kind of class you’re teaching?

(In a future post I’ll probably admit to the fact that I require students to memorize/recite poems. But not yet.)

Image by Flickr user bdunnette / Creative Commons licensed