12-11-2012, 04:01 PM
Formative Quizzes and the World Wide Web
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Abstract
The use of quizzes delivered and marked by computers is a long standing well tried technique for
helping people learn. This paper gives the rationale for, design of, and experience with, a system to
deliver and mark formative quizzes using the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW solves many
of the logistic and delivery problems associated with computer delivered quizzes, and makes them
easily accessible to a large number of people.
The paper discusses the design of a WWW system to deliver quizzes to students. It outlines the
advantages and potential of the WWW for this task and discusses problems and trade-offs compared
with other approaches. It reports on our experience with giving quizzes using a system at the City
University of Hong Kong.
Creating questions is a time consuming, difficult task. It is hoped that the quiz system will provide a
mechanism for question authors to share questions, thereby spreading the load of question creation
and development.
Quizzes and the Learning Environment
In this paper the term quiz means a set of questions to which a person gives a syntactically simple
response. Although the response is simple the questions can require a high level of cognitive
processing to answer correctly and so quizzes can be used for many purposes ranging from
entertainment questionnaires to formal examinations. Within a learning environment, Jacobs & Chase
(1992) say quizzes can be used for:
· grading student’s performance;
· giving instructors feedback on how their courses are performing;
· helping students learn; and
· motivating students to study.
The City University Quiz (CUQuiz) system’s main purposes are the last three. However, given the
appropriate administrative arrangements, it can be used for summative evaluation. A demonstration
site of CUQuiz can be reached at http://kcox.cs.cityu.edu.hk/quiztest
Administrative Needs of a Quiz System
A quiz system should be inexpensive, cost little to maintain, run on standard hardware and software
and require little clerical effort to run. One of the objectives of the quiz system was to create a system
that had these characteristics. This has been achieved by leaving almost all the administration and
control of quizzes with the people who create a quiz and to decentralise the servers on which quizzes
are run. Any lecturer or course provider can easily set up their own quiz system.
An administrative unit that decides to use the quiz system can obtain a copy from the authors and
install it on any networked PC running Microsoft Windows™ and Windows httpd (available from
http://www.citywin-httpd/). The main screens of the quiz system can be altered with any html
editor and so tailor the screens to an organisation.
Why use the WWW?
Quizzes are a versatile testing tool. They can be delivered on paper, given in class or given as
homework. Computerised quizzes can be delivered on an institutional central computer, on a
proprietary network or on a standalone machine. We have chosen to deliver them on the WWW to
solve several technical, organisational and logistic problems.
The main problem with paper quizzes is the logistics associated with marking and giving feedback to
students. Paper is convenient, cheap, flexible, requires no special equipment and is easily adapted.
Paper is probably the best way to give quizzes to students. It is unfortunate that it is hard to record and
mark paper quizzes. Machine marking solves some problems but it is difficult to do easily and the
feedback to students is slow. Students can be given the answers to quizzes at the same time as they
receive the quiz and asked not to look at the answers before attempting the quiz. This solves the speed
of feedback problem, but students have to be well disciplined and it is difficult for the lecturer to
obtain the student’s responses. Paper has advantages for delivery but disadvantages for marking and
providing information to the lecturer.
Putting quizzes on computers solves the student feedback problem but introduces problems of
distribution and access. Using an institutional computing network solves the problems of distribution
and collecting of student responses but introduces problems of student access and availability. Often
students have to work on special workstations or terminals, they cannot work from home and have to
make special bookings to use the machines. Software and hardware require special administrative
people for maintenance and organisation and often there are substantial software costs.
Limitations of a WWW delivery mechanism
The current system has limitations. Most of these are limitations caused by the limitations of WWW
browsers and the way the system has to operate. For example, we were unable to implement hidden
multiple choice questions where choices are presented one by one to the student after they answer true
or false on each choice. This is not practical at present because to get the next question it would be
necessary to return to the server as any operation that requires machine intelligence requires the
system to return to the server. This is impractical for these systems as the system does not have a
rapid enough reaction and, for all practical purposes, operates in a batch mode. That is, a form is filled
out then sent to the server which processes it and sends another form. This may be overcome with the
next version of WWW browsers that incorporate aplets that can be downloaded to the client
machines. This would allow greater interactivity and permit more complex client operations.
Implementation Issues
The system was implemented over the summer vacation by three first year student programmers
using Visual BasicTM. These students had completed two semesters of programming and data
structures using CTM. They had never seen Visual Basic or html documents or used the WWW. The
basic functionality was specified by the authors who guided its implementation.