Linking to LAPT vs. Native Moodle CBM
By the way - LAPT also has a "question challenge" feature - a "View / Make Comments" button.
I can vouch that LAPT is lightening fast. LAPT is really good!
However, I think if CBM can be built into Moodle somehow it will instantly get a wider audience than it might otherwise. People will download moodle and it will already do CBM. The first step in this is making some kind of hack or module to existing releases, to demonstrate it's useful and good, and can be done in Moodle.
I think people also may feel a little cautious about the overhead of having to learn two systems - moodle and lapt, rather than just one, and also having to learn about how to interface between them.
My vote would be to aim for developing native moodle CBM in one of the 1.6.x releases, because they have working conditional access / activity locking hacks, which I rather want as well. At the moment it doesn't look promising for activity locking until moodle 2.0. Anyway...
Aesthetically - there appears at first sight to be a jump from Moodle to LAPT. Moodle uses CSS, so in theory its questions should integrate well with the site's visual design. Does LAPT? How would one go about matching LAPT quizes' presentation to that used in their moodle site? In once sense it's a trivial matter to ignore - but others it's not - some people use Moodle to create paid for courses, and I suppose need to brand everything as their own. Also, there may be accessibility issues? - for example Oxford allows students to select high contrast and large text presentations of it's moodle materials.
(you can see this at http://openmoodle.conted.ox.ac.uk/ you have to register - which is free- then go to the Getting Research Published: example unit )
Negative marking
I am going through the forum threads on negative marking in Moodle (because CBM relies on negative marking to motivate students to rate their certainty appropriately). I've read that Moodle will not allow a negative score on a test, and one of the reasons for this is because teachers "rely" on it not being able to. (will see you on the other side of the threads - there are quite a few - I may be some time!)
I would have thought that it makes more sense for students to end up with a final test score of less than zero if they have been receiving feedback after each question (which are scored and fedback before going to the next question - like a Moodle 'lesson') that they have scored -6 points on that question.
It seems this is what LAPT does - it gives a raw 'mark' which can be negative, but it also gives a percentage correct, and other indices.
For example these are the score information that I got from doing a demo course in LAPT:
-------------------
Score Summary:
20 responses: 25% correct, Total CBM marks: -39
Breakdown:
5 responses at C=1 : 20% correct (=1 answers) Target: < 67%
6 responses at C=2 : 33% correct (=2 answers) Target: 67%-80%
9 responses at C=3 : 22% correct (=2 answers) Target: 80%-100%
and
TOTALS: Q's done=20, Marks=-39 (25% correct, %A=0%, CBS=0% : see explanation ) [T=2.1 min]
------------------
The LAPT marking system is very sophisticated... it introduces concepts like
%A - "% Above chance"... (see the "see explanation" link), and
CBS - "Certainty Based Score", which has a range from 0% to 100%.
Moodle's quiz score is analagous to the CBS I think.
It looks like if we're going to put CBM into Moodle natively, we may have to be able to cite several different 'scores' or 'marks', as well as enable negative marking?
I wonder how neccesary Prof. Gardner-Medwin has found these various scores?
Sacha