Heidi Olson

When revising your online course is it always good to review the effectiveness of the self-assessments and quiz questions. Are certain questions constantly being answered incorrectly? Do the questions need to be rewritten or are students not prepared enough to give a thorough and complete answer. It might not be obvious as students progress through the course but it is something that you should be aware of and change during a revision, if not sooner.

In Blackboard, you are able to review statistics about how your students are accessing the site, what time of day, how often, how long, but there is no information about the results of quizzes and which questions are most often missed. One solution is to download a spreadsheet with quiz questions and answers through the gradecenter, add some calculations and evaluate.

In the GradeCenter click on the downdown arrows in the quiz column heading and select Download Results.

You are then given some choices in what kind of file you want to download. I suggest selecting the tab-delimited option so you can use it in excel where you’ll want to manipulate the data.

I would also suggest you select By Question by User since you want to make conculsions on individual questions, not users.

If your tests are set up for multiple attempts and you want to see what the progression of missed questions might be, select all attempts to see the results of every attempt the students have made. Otherwise, select Only valid attempts.

Click on the Download Results link at the bottom of the page to download a copy of the file to your computer. Once you get the file you’ll see a lot of data that you might be able to remove. The columns that you are really interested in are the Question ID Question, Answer, Possible Points, Auto Score and Manual Score.

Open your document in excel or other spreadsheet application. Now its time to enter a couple of equations so that you are able to make decisions. I suggest:

1. Total up the Possible Points column.
2. Total up the Auto Score column.
3. Then determine what the percentage between these two columns is to determine the question’s success.

When reviewing the questions with a low percentage you can also identify the incorrect answer that is most often given. This might help to determine whether you need to rewrite the question or answers, readjust your content, , or make sure concepts are more thoroughly discussed or more examples are given. In this example 60% of the students got the wrong answer (FALSE).

Sometimes it is necessary to give students a limited amount of time to complete quizzes and exams in an online class. Research shows that it can be beneficial for some students and unfavorable for other students who have different learning styles to put a time limit on a test. When you do set a maximum time allowed, often very good students who quickly finish the quiz will go back and change answers and begin to second guess their first choices while students with anxiety might spend more energy worrying about the test itself then concentrating on the individual questions. On the other side, by not giving a time limit student find it harder to manage their time and many end up looking up the answers in lieu of learning the material.

If you decide to put a time limit on your quiz or exam, Blackboard has a built-in timer. It is helpful to be able to see what the elapsed time is and how much longer one has to finish the questions. You can set this up in Blackboard, but this capability resides in the particular browser the student has chosen to open Blackboard in and that browser’s settings. Most browser set-ups do not show the elapsed time by default.

It’s a good idea, especially if your quizzes are set up for single attempts, to create a “Test your Timer” quiz so students can see if their browser is set up to show the elapsed time. It doesn’t have to be a long and complicated test. If you give 2 minutes to answer 1 true/false question this should be enough time for them to see if the timer is working.

Create a new test and give it a description. Change the creation settings so you can include a picture and to give feedback for each answer.

Create a True/False question and add an image so the students know what to look for, then add feedback so a student has the resources to solve the issue.

Set up the quiz so student can take it multiple times without penalty. Set the clock to a couple minutes and make sure you check the box by Set Timer.

Make sure to also check the Detailed Results so that your feedback will appear if the student gets the incorrect answer.

In the gradebook: assign zero points to the quiz, change the Display as to Complete/Incomplete so that only a checkmark shows in the gradebook, and change the grading options so that it won’t affect the total points and doesn’t show up in the student’s view of the gradebook.

Note that you will see it but the asterick in the column header means that the student’s won’t. You will also see if a student’ tried it out because a green checkmark will appear.

When you preview a quiz as an instructor, you will not be able to see if the timer works or not. If you’re interested to see if your browser is set up to show a time, log into Blackboard and search for CDE Showcase to self-enroll yourself. Go to the Lesson Examples and then to Test your Browser for Elapsed Time Quiz. Feel free to take the verbiage and the image to use in your course or let us know and we can add it for you.

Go here for instructions on how to change your settings if the timer does not show up.

http://www.answers.vt.edu/ask4help/academic/vtkb3045.htm

When a quiz or survey is set up for a single attempt for student completion, you may find that certain circumstances occur that will require you to reset the assessment so that students can complete it.

Once a student clicks to enter the quiz if they click out of it, click submit, the power goes out, they close their browser, etc. then if they try to go back in to complete the assessment they will be “locked” out.

At this point they might contact you to ask what to do to complete their assignment or you might noticed a “lock” in the gradebook.

To reset the quiz so that student’s can continue, click on the lock. You will get the Modify Grade page where you can see that no points have been assigned. Click on the View button.

Here you see the student’s attempt to take the quiz or survey. Quickly scroll down through the quiz to see if they happened to answer any of the questions before their problem occurred that closed their quiz attempt. The best place to look is under the Given Answer.

If you see no answers then click on the Clear Attempt button to clear out the quiz and reset the student’s ability to retake the quiz.

If you see that students have answered some of the questions then you’ll have to make a judgement call on if you want the student to retake the entire quiz or just the parts that they did not get a chance to answer. At this point you’ll have to manual give points to the remaining questions.