The Quiz activity can be utilised in a number of ways, including as:

Diagnostic assessment

Diagnostic assessment occurs at the start of a semester, and can give both the student and the teacher an indication of the current capabilities of the student, as well as identifying areas for support and development. Based on the results of a diagnostic quiz, a student may be directed to academic support services or required to access additional readings. A diagnostic assessment is ungraded, and the results do not count towards a student’s overall grade.

Formative assessment

Formative assessment takes place throughout a semester, and can provide both the student and the teacher with an indication of how well the student is progressing through the unit. When used for formative assessment and designed to include effective feedback, a quiz can empower your students to take control of their own learning. Practice quizzes which you allow your students to take before undertaking the "real" quiz, are a type of formative assessment. Formative assessment may or may not be graded.

Summative assessment

Summative assessment takes place at the end of the semester. If using a quiz for the purposes of summative assessment you will need to be particularly mindful of your students' ability to share the questions and responses with each other via screen shots (images captured off the screen). Summative assessments are graded.

To learn more safeguards against academic dishonesty in the use of the Quiz activity within LEO, please read LEO Guides: How to set up a Quiz activity.

Adapted from Lyndon, M. 2015. Getting the most out of Moodle Quizzes. Academic Support, Technology & Innovation, University of Plymouth. Retrieved from http://blogs.plymouth.ac.uk/asti/getting-the-most-out-of-moodle-quizzes/ Accessed 18 May 2016.

A quiz in LEO is made up of several components.

The quiz activity

This is the framework or "shell" of the overall activity that holds the questions, determines their layout, and specifies how students will interact with the quiz.

The quiz activity and its settings will determine:

• When the quiz is available to students and for how long.
• How many attempts a student may make, and how long they have to make attempts.
• The overall grade for the quiz.
• Feedback they receive during and after their attempts.

To learn how to add a quiz to your unit and select the appropriate settings, please see LEO Guides: How to set up a Quiz activity.

The quiz questions

Once you have created your quiz, you will then need to add questions to it. You can create new questions when editing your quiz, or you can add specific or random questions from your question bank if you have created your questions in advance.

There are a number of different question types that behave differently and provide different outcomes for students. Questions have their own settings that determine the available marks, possible answers, and individual feedback to responses.

To learn how to add a new question to your quiz, please see LEO Guides: How to add questions to a quiz.

The quiz layout

While you are adding your questions, you can edit the layout of your quiz by moving questions around, paginating the layout (assigning a specified number of questions per page), and by adding different sections if you wish. An effective layout can help students by grouping questions of a similar type together, or by limiting the number of questions presented per page.

To learn how to edit your quiz layout, please see LEO Guides: How to edit the layout of your quiz.

The question bank

The question bank is not critical to the set-up of a quiz, and you can create and use a quiz without using a question bank.

However, taking the time to create a question bank will be a useful investment of your time. The question bank is an organised repository of all of the questions you have created in the unit. You can use the question bank to store your questions, and reuse them as in quizzes, lessons, and in other LEO units (as opposed to recreating your questions every time you create a new quiz).

To learn more about the question bank, please see LEO Guides: How to create and use a question bank.

If you need to create an activity to gather responses to one or more simple questions, you may consider the following tools instead of the quiz activity.

The Choice tool

If you are interested in submitting a poll to your students, or asking them to select between a set number of options, you can use the Choice tool. Choice allows you to request a response from your students to a single multiple choice question.

To learn more about the Choice tool please read LEO Guides: Choice.

The Feedback tool

If you would like to administer a survey to your students, or gather feedback, you should use the Feedback tool. This tool allows you to create a form using a range of question types to gather information from students in much the same way as a quiz, however the Feedback tool cannot be used for assessments.

To learn more about the Feedback tool please read LEO Guides: Feedback.

The Lesson tool

If you would like to mix together content pages with questions, the Lesson activity can be presented in a linear way or as an adaptive learning experience. Questions added to a Lesson activity include essay type questions, multiple choice, matching, numerical, short answer, and true/false. 

To learn more about the Lesson tool please read LEO Guides: Lesson

H5P

If you want to add interactivity to your unit, H5P allows you to create dynamic content such as interactive videos, presentations, games and quizzes. H5P quiz options include Multiple choice questions, drag and drop, memory games, dialog cards to name a few. H5P interactive activities can be embedded to a Book, Page or Lesson.

To learn more about H5P please read LEO Guides: H5P

Echo360 (Active Learning) 

Students and instructors can ask questions during class using discussion functions in Echo360 active learning. This can be used by the instructor to ask questions of the students as the class is running, or to answer questions students may have about a specific slide. Questions and answers are also saved as part of the Presentation, to review later.

To learn more about Echo360 (active learning) please read LEO Guides: How to use Active Learning in the classroom

Technical Resources

LEO Guides: How to set up a Quiz activity 

LEO Guides: How to add questions to a Quiz

LEO Guides: How to edit the layout of your Quiz

LEO Guides: How to create and use a Question Bank

LEO Guides: How to add user and group overrides

Moodle Docs 3.9: Quiz settings

Moodle Docs 3.9: Building a Quiz

Case Studies

Associate Professor Adam Bridgeman from the University of Sydney (Faculty of Science) provides his students with short quizzes for the purposes of both summative and formative assessment. Learn more about Adam's use of quizzes, and the feedback he received from his students.

Dr Victoria Serra-Sastre from the Department of Economics, City University (London) uses Quizzes with her Masters students and second year undergraduates. Read an interview with Dr Serra-Sastre.

Academic Resources

Butcher, P. 2014. Hands–on Moodle Quiz for the Edinburgh MoodleMoot workshop 2014. [online] OpenLearn Works. Retrieved from http://www.open.edu/openlearnworks/course/view.php?id=1703 Accessed 18 May 2016.

Effective quiz practices - MoodleDocs. 2016. Retrieved from https://docs.moodle.org/29/en/Effective_quiz_practices Accessed 18 May 2016.

Lyndon, M. 2015. Getting the most out of Moodle Quizzes. Academic Support, Technology & Innovation. Retrieved from http://blogs.plymouth.ac.uk/asti/getting-the-most-out-of-moodle-quizzes/ Accessed 18 May 2016.

Brothen, T., Daniel, D.B., Finley, D.L. and Force, P.I.T., 2004. Best principles in the use of on-line quizzing. Prepared for the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Pedagogical Innovations Task Force. Retrieved from http://teachpsych.org/Resources/Documents/otrp/pedagogy/onlinetesting.pdf

McLoughlin, C. and Reid, N., 2002. Seachange: design of online quiz questions to foster deep learning. In ASCILITE (pp. 843-846). Retrieved from http://www.ascilite.org/conferences/auckland02/proceedings/papers/179.pdf

Phillips, B., 2016. Beyond Classroom Learning: Personalized Learning Through Digital Technologies. Retrieved from http://ffhoarep.fh-ooe.at/handle/123456789/664