Hi Tim,
Thanks for the link to OU research! I encourage anyone who is doing well-designed research in Moodle to post to our research repository.
Maybe I’ll do a special edition of “Fourth Friday” all about OU research!
Regarding the paper you critiqued, yeah, I agree with all your points (which probably won’t surprise you). It wouldn’t have occurred to me that someone would seriously be worried about students using quizzes as a study tool (even limited ones like these). But then, I always feel any quiz or other assessments should be testing real application, not memorization, and if people want to start with a quiz to find out which material they need to spend time on, why not? Evidently some colleagues of these researchers objected to that idea, so their research was designed to show that for the students who were likely to retake quizzes, there was no harm done. (They didn’t mention the usual problem that the highest performing students seem to also over-study, if anything, and the weakest students don’t realize they need to study more.)
At least, that was my take on it. It wasn’t the strongest paper I’ve read in the past year by a long shot, but hey, it was a paper published in the past month in a relatively significant journal that used Moodle in the study... as you can see, I only found 4 such papers this month. ;) (I need to finish up some of my papers and submit them!)
Thanks for the link to OU research! I encourage anyone who is doing well-designed research in Moodle to post to our research repository.
Regarding the paper you critiqued, yeah, I agree with all your points (which probably won’t surprise you). It wouldn’t have occurred to me that someone would seriously be worried about students using quizzes as a study tool (even limited ones like these). But then, I always feel any quiz or other assessments should be testing real application, not memorization, and if people want to start with a quiz to find out which material they need to spend time on, why not? Evidently some colleagues of these researchers objected to that idea, so their research was designed to show that for the students who were likely to retake quizzes, there was no harm done. (They didn’t mention the usual problem that the highest performing students seem to also over-study, if anything, and the weakest students don’t realize they need to study more.)
At least, that was my take on it. It wasn’t the strongest paper I’ve read in the past year by a long shot, but hey, it was a paper published in the past month in a relatively significant journal that used Moodle in the study... as you can see, I only found 4 such papers this month. ;) (I need to finish up some of my papers and submit them!)