I am in the process of selecting a suitable open source software to design and develop quizzes to diagnose a student's weaknesses in Math; so the question to be posed to the student should depend on her/ his answer to an earlier question.
Are such IF conditionalities/ linkages possible in Moodle? Have they been already developed and tested anywhere?
The lesson activity provides broad conditionals and used with asciimath might suit your purposes
Hi Ramachandran, have you ever gotten answers for the blog above?
Hi, Ramachandran and Marc,
I have spent weeks trying to find ways to create an adaptive diagnostic assessment on Moodle but haven't had much luck. It's a critical component of my doctoral dissertation study in Distance Education. Any experience-sharing of suggestions are appreciated!
Susan
I am not certain hat you mean by diagnistic assessment. Certainly the quiz module will allow you to create an assessment. The are various types of math related quiz question types available, as well as numerous types of display options for maths, graphs, etc. Using Mauno's plugins (se advanced math tools in the docs) you can also provide students with the opportunity to respond to interactive graphs.The Lesson module is adaptive in that you can set how it responds to correct or incorrect answers.
You can also use the Moodle lesson module to create an assessment that pursues or abandons certain avenues or brnaches based on thestudents success.
You can also do an assessment in a hotpot (or its successor, TaskChain?) and the practice exams at http://www.iq.poquoson.org/math.htm give you an example of that
I am assuming that as a PhD candidate you would have read the Moodle docs on using both thgose modules, as well as information on the various questions types for the Moodle quiz module. So I guess I am at a loss as to what exactly you may be looking for.
Oh my! I guess I said about the same thing in this thread three years ago.....
To descibe an assessment as 'diagnostic' says much more about the teachers and student's intentions for how the results of that activity will be used, rather than what the particular activity is.
Therefore, the concept of diagnostic assessment is orthogonal to that of adaptive assessment, at least to a first approximation. To a second approximation, some types of activities may be more useful for dagnostic assessment than others.
Some options to consider:
- As others have said, Moodle's lesson module lets you build adaptive assessments in Moodle, though they are not easy to author.
- The quiz module can be a very powerful diagnostic tool, but does not have any adaptive features.
- You could create an adaptive assessment as a SCORM package, using a suitable authoring tool, and then upload that to Moodle or any other VLE.
- Moodle is a modular system. One could create a new activity plug-in that does exactly what you mean by 'adaptive assessment'. Here is one idea (that has never been built yet) http://tjhunt.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/what-i-want-to-build-next.html. Note that in Moodle, the question bank and question engine are separate components that could be used by any activity, therefore developign a new 'adaptive assessment' activity should be a relatively easy task.
Tim,
Thank you for teaching me a math word I did not know. Still, I'm going to disagree with you in principal and practice about diagnostic and adaptive assessment (&, please note that I'm neither a mathy nor a math teacher).
My organization's diagnostic math tests move from simple addition all the way up through high school algebra, geometry, etc. Not all as one test, obviously, but in sequence. The idea is that testers will reach a point beyond which they just can't answer any questions. (They also reveal "holes," such as converting decimals to fractions.)
I imagine significant points where a set of wrong answers results in a quiz score that returns Overall feedback with a password for another quiz. That quiz asks easier versions of the wrong answers, growing progressively more difficult. Say, you fail at double digit addition. You go to a quiz that starts with single digit addition and progresses to three digit addition.This second quiz is making sure the tester hasn't just made a mistake on the first quiz and also asking how much the tester does not know.
Then you go back to the main path and take a quiz on subtraction. The main path is set with conditional access. You have to complete Addition before you go on to Subtraction, etc.
Of course, two things I'd prefer to see are 1) the next thing you wanted to build last September and 2) Lesson using your new question engine.
Still, I think an adaptive, diagnostic test is doable right now.
This has been done. In the 1990 See
http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/john.appleby/diagpage/diagindx.htm
and
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131597000018
Really, I sometimes wonder if we have achieved anything pedagogically in the last 10 years, of if we have just spend a lot of effort rewriting everything to be web pages instead of applications. Then I wonder if we are just going to spend the next 10 years rewriting everything to be applications (apps) again.
Tim has hit a stand up double!
One
I wish I'd known about diagnosys in 1997, but then, I'm not a math educator.
Tim "I sometimes wonder if we have achieved anything pedagogically in the last 10 years, or if we have just spent a lot of effort rewriting everything to be web pages instead of applications."
I wrote something similar in the conclusion to my PhD thesis, back in 2001. See "Suivre le chemin que d'autres ont balisé". To summarize, I was lamenting the fact that the kind of "interactive" activities available on the Web then (2001) were far less inventive than the standalone software CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) activities developed back in the 1980s (30 years ago!).
Joseph
PS.- @Ben, and I'm not a maths teacher either.
Well,
All I can say is that I was following you folk who were ahead of your time.
How amazing that we were after the same thing so long ago.
How amazing that you achieved so much!
Well, the big step forward we have made in the last decade is in democritising the technology. If the 90s, if you wanted to create interactive quizzes, you basically had to write computer code. Now, you can create a Moodle quiz using your web browser, and just pointing-and-clicking.
There are quite a few SCORM editing tools that allow branching based on previous answers. I have played with Wondershare Quizcreator which is quite nice (and reasonably priced) and the Terminator of Scorm editors that is the Adobe product. However I don't particularly like using scorm as it usually seems to nearly work. By contrast Moodle quizzes almost always work.
We have developed a Quiz module for Moodle with adaptive questions (with mathematics in mind) at wiris.com. It extends the default Quiz module with the capability of defining paths that are followed according to the grade of the previous question. We haven’t published the module yet but if you are interested we could provide you with more information. In any case, this module will be charge-free.
Our Quiz module is broadly used by the Open University of Catalonia at Spain (UOC) which is a distance university www.uoc.edu
This module is complemented with our full set of question types to improve the mathematical questions. We call that WIRIS quizzes. But you do not need to install such components to run the adaptive questions engine.
Dani