I was struck the other day by the feedback left by a student about an M-STEP Review course he or she had taken part in. The student’s feedback was this:

The thing is, this is a lot of stuff. Your average student doesn’t want to do this much studying for a test that only benefits the school they’re about to leave and not themselves. There should be more incentive for the students.

It’s no secret that students are being tested to death. And one thing that is contributing to the sense of despair students feel in the midst of all the testing is the fact that they are on to us: they know that most of the testing they’re doing just allows us to gather data on them without having much immediate impact on their lives.

But every assessment should — and could — be a learning experience.

Teachers that have discovered the amazing capabilities of Moodle (iLearn) know they have a plethora of possibilities at their disposal. One of these is the ability to build feedback into the questions we ask students and allow them to access this feedback immediately upon their response to a question, or after they finish their quiz.

There are a few types of feedback you can give within a Moodle question. Here are the types available for a multiple choice question:

• General Feedback: Feedback that every student will get, regardless of their answer. An example of this might be to give the page number, website, or video reference for a given question.
• Specific Feedback: Feedback that a student will receive based on his/her specific answer choice.
• Combined Feedback: Feedback that a student will receive if he or she chooses any incorrect answer, answers a question partially correctly, or correctly.

Any and all of this feedback can be used in any one question. Here’s an example of specific feedback:

In order for students to see feedback, review options must be set to allow for this in the quiz settings. And, if you would like the feedback to be visible while the student is taking the quiz, a question behavior such as “Immediate Feedback” or “Adaptive Mode” must be selected, along with the review options you would like students to have.

(For more on Quiz Feedback times and options, check out the Technology Department’s Post Quiz Default Review Options in iLearn.)

We owe it to our students to allow them to get something out of every experience in our classrooms. Even tests.