Quizzes / Exams: Assessing Understanding

Assessments are used to  evaluate your student's competency and understanding.  Online learning environments, due to their 24/7 availability and interactivity, allow for opportunities in student assessment that are unique to this environment. Technology can facilitate a working student taking a midterm at midnight and receiving timely feedback on their performance. 

Basically there are two types of assessment--formative and summative. A formative assessment is used to form and/or revise an educational process within the course as you are teaching it. An example of formative assessment is the muddiest point technique where students share one thing they do not understand. It provides you with an opportunity to clarify and support student understanding from week to week while also demonstrating your students' learning in process (read more about it in the example below).

A summative assessment evaluates student learning at the end of an instructional milestone like a midterm exam or final course project. Optimally you would include both because the formative assessment demonstrates learning in progress and the summative assessment demonstrates what a student has learned.

Incorporate formative assessment and offer your students feedback that is not related to a score. Provide a channel for your students to provide this type of feedback about your course as well. Summative assessments should be accompanied by rubrics up front. Tell your students which assessments are formative and which are summative. Incorporate a variety of assessment types for different types of learners (quizzes, presentations, cases, simulations, group projects).

A consistent key to effective teaching--whether in the classroom, in a flipped environment or fully online--is to check in with your students. Asking these 2 simple questions "How is the course going?" and "How are you doing in the course?" can open up surprising communication. and help you take a formative pulse of the students in your course.

In a medical school class of 175 students it can be challenging to check in. Students are hesitant to critique their professor, the course or admit to confusion. Students at a life science university worked with their ID team to set up a weekly anonymous survey in their campus LMS they dubbed the Magic Feedback Box. Teachers received weekly feedback in real time ranging from "this week's resource links were broken" to "...I am anxious about starting anatomy labs next week--excited about the learning but worried about my reaction to my first patient (the cadaver)" to " a review of antigen specificity and adaptive immune response before our lab would be beneficial..."

Canvas is also a place to offer high stakes quizzes and exams with multiple question types  (e.g., multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, essay, matching, etc.), randomized questions, and feedback options. Quiz settings allow you to customize things like the number of attempts a student may submit, time limits, and the display of correct responses and feedback from the instructor. Instructors are often concerned about cheating in online exams. A question group allows you to create a pool of questions that Canvas will randomly draw from. Every student takes a unique quiz. After creating a question group within a quiz, instructors can either drag and drop questions into the group or pull from an existing question bank. For how to info visit the Canvas Help Resources Canvas Quizzes.

Think about having a weekly Zoom meeting where students are required to present their 'muddiest  point'.  "A Muddiest Point is a quick monitoring technique in which students are asked to take a few minutes to write down the most difficult or confusing part of a lesson, lecture, or reading..." ( from Muddiest Point: Tools for Formative Assessment Links to an external site.). This can be particularly useful if students are tackling a widely considered challenging concept. Statistics qualifies and many students arrive intimidated, which is why Professor Randy Fedoruk designed weekly Zoom sessions as a foundational component of the Quantitative Analysis course in the Occupational Therapy doctoral program. Students submitted their muddiest point in a Canvas assignment prior to the session and were also required round robin style to present them in the weekly Zoom.

Use Zoom for student projects and presentations. This is excellent practice for real life where remote working is becoming more of a norm. Zoom can also be used for a proctored high stakes exam by leveraging Zoom break out rooms. Set up as many break out rooms as you have students with a maximum of one member. As the meeting host you can bounce between all the rooms checking in on your students.