Contributor: Hélène Tyrrell, Rumi Begum
Department: School of Law
Quick summary
Quizzes have proved to be a useful assessment and revision tool for students, thus School of Law created quizzes to help students test themselves on key areas of the course. The aim was
- for a quiz to accompany the readings for each of the 9 topics within the module to prompt students to think about the readings before attending the seminars and allow tutors to assess prior understanding and provide feedback
- for students to self-test themselves throughout the year, with a view to recalling important topics even after the relevant tutorial has passed
Background
One of the key aims for the School of Law is to improve student satisfaction. One core undergraduate law module has a reputation for difficulty and many of the students report that they feel daunted by the end of year exam. In particular, students report that they find it difficult to retain the lessons from tutorial to tutorial.
We uploaded two initial quizzes, set up by one of the course tutors (Dr Helene Tyrrell) to test the popularity of the initiative. When the popularity of the quizzes became clear, we recruited three current students to design quizzes. Current (end of year) students were recruited because they would be able to draw on their experiences of learning the course content during the year and address areas they found difficult in the quizzes. In this sense, the students would have a better understanding of useful questions than the course tutors. A useful side-effect was that the project was beneficial for the students’ own exam revision, as they would need to revisit the course content to create the quizzes.
Methodology
Three students were recruited and trained on the creation of quizzes on QMplus. This included a 2 hour session with Dr Tyrrell, who talked the students through question design and also performed the QMplus training on quiz creation. The students were asked to create 7 quizzes between them and upload them to a test area on QMplus. Once completed, the quizzes were tested by teachers on the course and any necessary amendments were made. The approved quizzes were imported to the live course area and made available to students by placing them in the associated topic area on QMplus but were also hyperlinked to a separate ‘Quizzes’ block (a simple HTML block).
The total hours projected were 28. The work was done within the predicted hours and timeframe.
Outcome/Results
The first two quizzes were released in February 2015 and recorded 134 and 89 attempts. The quizzes were received well by students demonstrated by scores/comments in the student feedback forms for the module. The 2015 student feedback scores for the Administrative Law module returned an average score of 4.16 out of 5 (where 5 is ‘definitely agree’) for the statement ‘I had access to good learning resources for the module’, increased from 3.87 in the previous year. The quizzes were especially popular in the revision period. The remaining 7 quizzes were released at the end of the revision period so will be used and monitored in the 2015-16 academic year. This positive outcome will be used to demonstrate the usefulness of QMplus quizzes to other course leaders and to encourage the adoption of interactive e-learning tools across all courses in the School of Law.
Advice for others
To ensure the quality and accuracy of quizzes, it is important that teachers check the quiz questions. In the case of this module, it helped that there was a teacher who was also proficient in the use of QMplus. This made the editing process and final import very quick as the teacher could edit the quiz and then perform the import to the live course.
