Skip to content

Tag: Assessment

Published on Leave a comment on Brightspace Tip #469: Test/Quiz Question Generator

Do you want your students to take a quiz or test online? Do you have a test that you normally administer on paper and you don’t want to retype all the questions into Brightspace? Learning and Teaching Services at Algonquin College developed a Test/Quiz Question Generator that provides an easy way of creating a collection of questions that can be imported into Brightspace.

the word test written in chalk on a chalkboard

Quiz questions have to be in a special format in order to be imported into Brightspace. The Test/Quiz Question Generator allows you to reformat your questions and it will create a CSV file that can be imported into Brightspace.

Additionally, the Brightspace Community developed a Quiz Question Converter that you can use to add a bank of questions to the Quiz Question Library. One benefit of using the Quiz Question Converter is that you can add feedback and hints to the quiz questions you are importing into Brightspace. Therefore saving you time in importing quiz questions with feedback and hints into Brightspace.

Want more information?

Test/Quiz Question Generator (Algonquin College)
Quiz Question Converter (Brightspace Community)

About Quizzes
Quizzes, Surveys, and Question Libraries
Question Types and When to Use Them
Understanding Grading Options for Question Types
Use Quiz Results Displays to Show Quiz Results

View current, past, and preview upcoming Continuous Delivery release notes
Instructors Quick Start Tutorial
Brightspace Known Issues
Request a sandbox course
Sign-up for Brightspace training sessions
You can find Brightspace help at D2L's website.
Join the Brightspace Community.
Try these Brightspace How-To documents.
Visit our Brightspace FAQs for additional Brightspace information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.

Image credit: image by geralt from Pixabay

Published on Leave a comment on Brightspace Tip #451: Quiz, Survey, or Self-Assessment?

man writing on paper

Brightspace has a variety of formative and summative assessment tools available for instructors to use in their courses. You may be wondering which tool you should use. This blog post explains the difference between the Quizzes, Surveys, and Self-Assessments (SA) tools to help you determine which of the tools is the best tool to meet your needs.

  • A Quiz provides students with a score. Quizzes can be linked to the Grade Book to affect the final grade, but are not required to be linked to the Grade Book. This tool is commonly used for summative assessments (i.e., quizzes, tests, exams).
  • Surveys are not graded or scored, but do provide results to the instructor. Survey results can be viewed and downloaded as needed. Surveys can be anonymous.
  • Self-Assessments is a formative assessment tool that enables instructors to provide learners with a series of questions and give immediate feedback to their responses. A Self-Assessment is solely for the purpose of the learner to assess their understanding of the content. Instructors CANNOT view the results of a Self-Assessment, but they are able to see who has taken the Self-Assessment and the time spent on it. The omission of numeric evaluation enables learners to make reflective learning and course material comprehension their main priorities during a Self-Assessment.

The following table compares the feedback and reporting for each tool:

Quizzes Surveys Self-Assessments
Feedback for learner Feedback is released based on the options set by instructor. Feedback can be setup to be instant (upon submission) or delayed. Feedback is released after completion in the form of a report. Feedback is provided immediately after answering question.
Reporting for instructor Reporting for Instructors – yes, instructors can see summative feedback on scores and individual questions. Reporting for Instructors – yes, reports are generated, and can be done so anonymously. Reporting for Instructors – yes, but limited to who has taken SA and the time spent; instructors CANNOT view results of the SA.

This table provides some use cases for Quizzes, Surveys, and Self-Assessments:

Tool Use Case
Quizzes
  • Measuring knowledge acquisition: Assess factual recall, comprehension, and application of learned concepts. Assess skills for the purpose of determining whether instruction has been effective.
  • Evaluating critical thinking: Open ended questions requiring analysis, synthesis, or evaluation can assess higher-order thinking skills.
  • Standardized test: Deliver high-stakes tests with secure features like time limits, question randomization, paging, and integration with lockdown browsers.
  • Formative assessment: Create low-stakes quizzes for students to practice and receive immediate feedback. Assess skills for the purpose of identifying areas needing improvement.
Surveys
  • Gauging student understanding: Use anonymous surveys to assess student comprehension of course material before, during, or after a lesson.
  • Gathering opinions on teaching methods: Evaluate the success of specific teaching approaches or gather suggestions for improvement.
  • Course satisfaction surveys: Collect feedback on student experience with the course content, delivery, and overall effectiveness.
Self-Assessments
  • Promoting metacognition: Encourage students to reflect on their learning progress, strengths, and weaknesses through self-evaluation activities.
  • Identifying learning gaps: Allow students to assess their own understanding of key concepts before moving on to new material.
  • Personalized learning: Use self-assessment results to tailor learning experiences or provide targeted resources based on individual needs.

By understanding the strengths of each tool, instructors can select the most effective tool for the job.

A Note About the Question Library

The Question Library is a central repository that stores and archives questions which you can reuse within a course. You can create multiple sections within the Question Library to organize your questions by type and topic, making it easier for you to find, use, and reuse questions in your quizzes, surveys, and self-assessments.

As a better practice for storage, organization, and easy access, I recommend that you create all your questions using the Question Library. You can also consolidate questions created within the Quizzes, Surveys, and Self-Assessments tools by importing them back into the Question Library.

Want more information?

Quizzes Tool
Surveys Tool
Self-Assessments Tool
Question Library

#LEX Advanced Topics:
Rethinking and Improving Online Tests in Brightspace
Allow Learners to Reflect on Their Learning

View current, past, and preview upcoming Continuous Delivery release notes
Instructors Quick Start Tutorial
Brightspace Known Issues
Request a sandbox course
Sign-up for Brightspace training sessions
You can find Brightspace help at D2L's website.
Join the Brightspace Community.
Try these Brightspace How-To documents.
Visit our Brightspace FAQs for additional Brightspace information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.

Image credit: image by StockSnap from Pixabay (image cropped)

Published on Leave a comment on ICYMI: Using Alternative Assessments to Improve Student Learning

Using Alternative Assessments to Improve Student Learning [33:32]

Thanks to those of you who attended last week's Using Alternative Assessments to Improve Student Learning workshop. The workshop, the fifteenth in our #LEX Advanced series, helps you to build on the skills you learned in the #LearnEverywhereXULA course and helps you to improve your assessment practices.

In case you missed last week’s training session or if you attended the training session and want to recap what was covered, a copy of the workshop recording and resources referenced in the workshop are available. You can find the workshop recording and other resources in support of the workshop on the CAT+FD wiki.

Additionally, if you did not get the opportunity to earn a digital badge for participating in the workshop, it's not too late to earn that badge. We have a corresponding “Alternative Assessments” module in the #LearnEverywhereXULA (#LEX) course that you can complete to earn a digital badge for this topic. The badge will count towards your #LEX Advanced certification.

Published on Leave a comment on Brightspace Tip #378: Quiz Question Converter

Do you want your students to take a quiz or test online? Do you have a test that you normally administer on paper and you don’t want to retype all the questions into Brightspace? The Quiz Question Converter is a tool, from the Brightspace Community, that you can use to add a bank of questions to the Quiz Question Library.

The Quiz Question Converter will create a CSV file for import into Brightspace. Quiz questions have to be in a special format in order to be imported into Brightspace.

Example of a multiple choice question reformatted for the quiz question converter.
Example of a multiple choice question reformatted for the Quiz Question Converter.

One benefit of using the Quiz Question Converter is that you can add feedback and hints to the quiz questions you are importing into Brightspace. Therefore saving you time in importing your quiz questions along with the feedback and hints all in the same import file.

This guide explains how to use the Quiz Question Converter.

ICYMI, follow these links to watch a recording of our Back to Basics: Tests and Quizzes and Beyond the Basics: Complex Tests in Brightspace training sessions.

Want more information?

Quiz Question Converter (Brightspace Community)
Brightspace Tip #342: New Quiz Creation Experience
Quizzes, Surveys, and Question Libraries
Brightspace Tip #325: Question Types and When to Use Them

View all the Brightspace training recaps
Instructors Quick Start Tutorial
Continuous Delivery release notes
Brightspace Known Issues
Request a sandbox course
Sign-up for Brightspace training sessions
You can find Brightspace help at D2L's website.
Join the Brightspace Community.
Try these Brightspace How-To documents.
Visit our Brightspace FAQs for additional Brightspace information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.

Published on Leave a comment on ICYMI: Rethinking and Improving Online Tests in Brightspace

Rethinking and Improving Online Tests in Brightspace [42:41]

Thanks to those of you who attended last week's Rethinking and Improving Online Tests in Brightspace workshop. The workshop, the fourteenth in our #LEX Advanced series, helps you to build on the skills you learned in the #LearnEverywhereXULA course and challenges you to rethink and improve your tests and exams for better learning assessment.

In case you missed last week’s training session or if you attended the training session and want to recap what was covered, a copy of the workshop recording and resources referenced in the workshop are available. You can find the workshop recording and other resources in support of the workshop on the CAT+FD wiki.

Additionally, if you did not get the opportunity to earn a digital badge for participating in the workshop, it's not too late to earn that badge. We have a corresponding “Online Tests” module in the #LearnEverywhereXULA (#LEX) course that you can complete to earn a digital badge for this topic. The badge will count towards your #LEX Advanced certification.

Published on Leave a comment on ICYMI: Rethinking Multiple-Choice Tests for Better Learning Assessment

hand holding pencil over a bubble answer sheet with some answers bubbled in

Traditional testing relies on multiple choice, true/false, and written response type questions. In authentic assessments, students apply concepts to real world situations by completing meaningful task-based assessments. This type of assessment engages a variety of skills and effectively measures higher levels of learning than traditional assessment.

Authentic assessments are widely viewed as pedagogically superior, yet multiple-choice assessments are often preferable to instructors and students alike.

In an Inside Higher Ed opinion piece, Eric Loepp challenges instructors to rethink the premise that multiple-choice questions cannot meet the standards of authentic assessment. He argues that there are situations where higher-order multiple-choice questions can be used for assessment. If this has piqued your interest, you can read more in his “The Benefits of Higher-Order Multiple-Choice Tests” opinion piece for more information.

Image credit: Exam by Alberto G. licensed under CC BY 2.0

Published on Leave a comment on ICYMI: Assessments in a Virtual Environment

clipart of iPad screen with an online assessment

A common question in online learning is “How do we keep students from cheating in online exams?” A shift from traditional means of assessment (quizzes, tests, exams) to authentic and alternative assessments is critical in virtual settings.

If faculty try to assess their students the same way they did in a face-to-face setting, they will most likely find themselves frustrated, as well as frustrating their students.

In a Faculty Focus article, Laura McLaughlin, EdD, and Joanne Ricevuto, EdD, provided some recommendations to improve the use of assessments in virtual environments and decrease concerns regarding cheating. Their recommendations are:

  1. Allow choice in assessments: Let students decide how they will demonstrate their learning.
  2. Authentic and stackable assessments: Students should be told why they are assigned a particular assessment, and why it is relevant to their learning.
  3. Trust students: Provide alternative assessments (not quizzes and tests) where the concern of cheating is off the table.
  4. Frequent feedback and communication: Provide feedback that helps learners improve their learning.

Teaching in a virtual environment creates an opportunity to rethink your practices, try something new, and embrace deeper and more engaging ways of assessing students without using lockdown browsers or worrying about students cheating.

If this has piqued your interest, you can read more in this Assessments in a Virtual Environment: You Won’t need that Lockdown Browser! article.

Did you miss our (Re)Thinking Exams workshop? If you want to learn about ways you can challenge your students to demonstrate what they've learned while teaching in an online environment, watch this (Re)Thinking Exams workshop recording. In this workshop, Dr. Elizabeth Yost Hammer and Dr. Jay Todd discussed and demonstrated ways that focused active learning activities can be used in place of more traditional methods of assessment like quizzes and tests.

The sudden shift to remote learning led to concerns about new opportunities for students to engage in unauthorized shortcuts. During spring 2021, three academic integrity and STEM professionals from the University of Maryland Global Campus, a primarily online institution, shared research on academic integrity in online courses, strategies for promoting integrity in remote learning environments, and examples of how content learning is achieved in any setting designed for online education. ICYMI, here's a link to the Proactive Approaches for Academic Integrity in Remote and Online Learning workshop recording.

Image credit: "online assessment" by jflorent is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 and is a derativie of image by coffeebeanworks and image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Published on Leave a comment on Brightspace Tip #324: Test/Quiz Question Generator

Do you want your students to take a quiz or test online? Do you have a test that you normally administer on paper and you don’t want to retype all the questions into Brightspace? Learning and Teaching Services at Algonquin College developed a Test/Quiz Question Generator that provides an easy way of creating a collection of questions that can be imported into Brightspace.

the word test written in chalk on a chalkboard

Quiz questions have to be in a special format in order to be imported into Brightspace. The Test/Quiz Question Generator allows you to reformat your questions and it will create a CSV file that can be imported into Brightspace. Refer to this question types and formatting guide for information on how to format your questions.

Additionally, the Brightspace Community developed a Quiz Question Converter that you can use to add a bank of questions to the Quiz Question Library. One benefit of using the Quiz Question Converter is that you can add feedback and hints to the quiz questions you are importing into Brightspace. Therefore saving you time in importing quiz questions with feedback and hints into Brightspace.

ICYMI, follow these links to watch a recording of our Back to Basics: Tests and Quizzes and Beyond the Basics: Complex Tests in Brightspace training sessions.

Want more information?

Test/Quiz Question Generator (Algonquin College)
Question types and formatting guide (for the Test/Quiz Question Generator)

Quiz Question Converter (Brightspace Community)

Quizzes, Surveys, and Question Libraries
Question Types and When to Use Them
Use Submission Views to Show Quiz Results

View all the Brightspace training recaps
Instructors Quick Start Tutorial
Continuous Delivery release notes
Brightspace Known Issues
Request a sandbox course
Sign-up for Brightspace training sessions
You can find Brightspace help at D2L's website.
Join the Brightspace Community.
Try these Brightspace How-To documents.
Visit our Brightspace FAQs for additional Brightspace information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.

Image credit: image by geralt from Pixabay

Leave a comment on Conversation #109: Gianina Baker on Equitable Assessment

A conversation between Elizabeth Yost Hammer and Gianina Baker on teaching, learning, and equitable assessment.

Gianina Baker

Gianina Baker, Acting Director with the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, provides leadership and directs research specific to the assessment of student learning at colleges and universities, primarily under the Lumina Foundation grants, at NILOA. Her main research interests include student learning outcomes assessment at Minority Serving Institutions, access and equity issues for underrepresented administrators and students, assessment in athletics, and higher education policy. She holds a Ph.D. in Educational Organization & Leadership with a Higher Education concentration from the University of Illinois, a M.A. in Human Development Counseling from Saint Louis University, and a B.A. in Psychology from Illinois Wesleyan University. Previous to this position, she was the Director of Institutional Effectiveness & Planning at Richland Community College.

Elizabeth Yost Hammer (headshot)
Elizabeth Yost Hammer

Elizabeth Yost Hammer is the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development and a Kellogg Professor in Teaching in the Psychology Department. She received her Ph.D. in experimental social psychology from Tulane University.

Bart Everson is a media artist and creative generalist at Xavier University's Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development. His recent work draws on integrative learning, activism, critical perspectives on technology, and Earth-based spiritual paths.

Links for this episode:

Transcript:

Coming soon!

Leave a comment on Conversation #108: Joe Bandy on Equitable Assessment

A conversation between Elizabeth Yost Hammer and Joe Bandy on teaching, learning, and equitable assessment.

Joe Bandy is Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching and affiliated faculty in the Department of Sociology at Vanderbilt University.  He received his PHD from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1998, and was Assistant and Associate Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College from 1998 to 2010, after which he came to Vanderbilt.  

Elizabeth Yost Hammer (headshot)
Elizabeth Yost Hammer

Elizabeth Yost Hammer is the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development and a Kellogg Professor in Teaching in the Psychology Department. She received her Ph.D. in experimental social psychology from Tulane University.

Links for this episode:

Transcript:

Coming soon!