Quiz

For the first 2 levels in Bloom (Knowledge and Comprehension), multiple-choice and True/False questions are pretty easy to make. As you get to levels 4-6, essay questions become more useful (and it's harder to automatically grade).

Personally, I use quiz questions and question banks to evaluate knowledge and comprehension, as the students can do this outside of my class (it takes up too much time in class, not allowing evaluation on the other aspects, which I find are better suited for class exercises).

Reading is a great way for students to aquire knowledge and understanding (Bloom's meanings), and so I use the organization of the reading material to create questions regarding the knowledge. In one of my courses, there are good summaries of learning objectives as well as the heuristics that students need to know. It's relatively easy to make multiple-choice or true-false questions using the material straight from the book.

However, I will paraphrase my question/answers with respect to the text in the book. So it's not just a question of having the student skim the text to find the answers (without understanding). None of these methods is perfect, of course.

Finally, I tend to use the same categories in my question bank as the structure in the text book. Occasionally, there are cross-cutting themes (I teach software analysis and design, so UML notation is a theme that re-appears throughout the textbook, without necessarily having a dedicated chapter on it). I will create categories for those themes.

One of my colleagues found this reference to Bloom and Moodle in the so-called "Moodle Tool Guide," which I think is appropriate here:  http://www.somerandomthoughts.com/blog/2012/03/15/a-moodle-2-version-of-the-moodle-tool-guide/ 

Quizzes get a mention of "red" saying that they're not easy to set up and they take time. I concur! I think Moodle needs some abstraction tools (typical-use templates) to make this easier. 80% of the users are probably going to use 20% of the configurations of quizzes, for example. It would be good to have those typical configs in templates.

One approach is

1. Start by thinking about the learning outcomes you want to assess.
2. Then think about the most authentic way you can get the student to demonstrate that they have attained that learning outcome in a way that the computer can grade.
3. That will lead you to a choice of question type.

To do that well, you need a certain amount of experience with how the different Moodle question types work, and the ways you can do them. The only real way to get that experience is to start authoring questions. In other words, you just need to start, and be prepared for you first questions not to be great, but reflect on what you are doing, and learn as you go.

It is a good debate whether you can write the questions first and then later think about assembling them into quizzes, or whether you need to know the context of the quiz you are planning to build, before you can write questions that fit into that. There are arguments in both sides.

@Alexandro,

I guess one reason why it's difficult for me to understand your query is that, when I was using Moodle for my teaching (English as a foreign language), I would never create questions in the questions bank to be used in "potential" quizzes. When I was creating a quiz, I created the questions I needed for that quiz, and that was it.

Of course I realize there are many other ways to use questions and to build quizzes, but I've never resorted to those other ways.

You write "I think is important to share if the technique of coming up with relevant and clear questions can be pre-designed before starting making quizzes left and right."

For me, it's the reverse, it is important to come up with a clear idea of what you want to put in a well-designed quiz before starting making questions left and right."

Joseph