Online Testing 01: QuestionMark Perception Self-tests -- Maurice Gallagher

Self assessment excersises, such as multiple choice questions and diagram labelling, offer ways for students to reinforce their knowledge and identify areas of uncertainty that otherwise would be missed. It also helps develop a good intellectual overview of a subject.

Background

Teaching History:

Maurice joined the University in 1989. Through the years, he has been making ongoing contributions to the design, teaching and tutoring of courses from first-year up to MSc level. For example:

In 1991, he designed microbiology labs and lectures for Origin and Diversity of Life (1st year)
He helped with tutorials in Human Population Biology (now known as 'Environmental and Community Biology') in the early 1990s
In 1992, he was involved in the design and implementation of a new course 'Microorganisms, Cells and Immunity', and subsequently taught on this course until 2000
He has been a director of studies since 1991
He designed and restructured several Microbiology courses
He put together a Vaccine Elective course in 2002 which consistently attracts students from a range of Biological and Biomedical Sciences Honours programmes
He has acted as an external examiner for undergraduate degree programmes in areas of Microbiology and Food Microbiology

Current Teaching Context:

His main expertise is in Microbiology, but has also taught in other areas of biology.

He is course organiser for Molecular Microbiology (3rd Year)
He is teaching on Biotechnology Honours
He supervises medics (MD students) and postdocs (from time to time) and has a team of post-graduates, some of who have interdisciplinary projects in Immunology, Chemistry or Physics
He teaches on the third-year course 'Structure and Functions of Proteins'

Molecular Microbiology is required for Biotechnology Honours.

What

What's Special:

Maurice uses an online assessment system for students to test their own knowledge in a computer lab towards the end of a semester.

"I became aware of some of the electronic teaching options, one of which was QuestionMark Perception and I found out what you could do within the system and basically developed a dataset of questions that our students could use."

This bank of questions Questionmark:

covers theory, data interpretation and practical applications
assesses via Multiple choice, calculation and in a visual context (e.g. labelling diagrams)
Gives knowledge and reinforcement and conceptual development

What Technology:

QuestionMark Perception is an online assessment system that the University offers for free to academic members for teaching purposes and IS provides central support for it. The system allows a user to create up to 22 styles of questions, but the most commonly used types are only a handful, such as multiple-choice questions, hot-spot questions, and short answer questions, etc. Students do not need to install anything on their computers to access the tests and their performances can be logged and retrieved. If a student has a smartphone, she/he can also access the tests on her/his mobile phone.

Why

Ideas and Motives:

"The reason we developed it is because our students constantly ask for more tutorials of the problem solving type ... so this was an additional way of giving them some skills and some opportunities to self develop."

Advantages:

QuestionMark Perception allows different styles of questions :

MCQs
drop down boxes
diagrams to label
graphs to interpret
Calculations

This reinforces the theory and also puts it into a practical setting.

The students get feedback and can see what they need to improve on, and can repeat the questions (with an automated promting facility) until they establish the right answer.

"It gives the students an early opportunity to see how they are getting on themselves and also it can be done throughout the semester."

How

General Procedure:

QuestionMark Perception is a web-based application. The implementation procedure Maurice adopts is as follows:

The bank of questions needs to be set up on the web.
A computer lab is booked for an afternoon.
Postgraduate student demonstrators can be used to provide help.
The students each log onto a computer so they have their own set of questions.
They are told they can repeat the self test until they are happy with their results.

However, QuestionMark Perception tests may also be used on any computer with a student login and need not be held in a computer lab.

Outcomes

Visible Outcomes:

The question bank in QuestionMark Perception helped the students in the following ways

reassured them about preparation for the practical exam
consolidated their conceptual understanding of the subject material
sparked curiosity
encouraged peer learning in groups

Student Feedback:

The students were asked if they welcomed self education, and they were positive about the experience. The impression given by the students was that they found having relevant and numerical questions valuable.

Assessment:

The question bank uses questions from previous exams, which helps

preparation for both the theory and practical exam
develops exam skills
learning to work in a team

"I think it has given them a much broader taste of exam questions that spreads across both the theory and theory of practical type of exams. It is taking theory and putting it into a real context."

Reflections

Difficulties:

Generating the bank of questions is quite consuming, but need only be done once
Importing pictures into perception can sometimes cause the labels to become miss-aligned - import as JPEGs
Making sure that correct answers in all forms are acceptable, for example if the answer is 2, all representations of "2", "two", "ii" or "II" need to be identified as correct
The system for entering the questions to the bank was not straightforward to use, as editing capacity is very limited unless you have administrative rights.

Transferability:

"... we are going to have more group interaction so self-study and group learning approaches are going to be quite important and I imagine we will use more e-Learning in the future."

Preparing a bank of questions is very time consuming and support is needed to guide and steer the development of the questions to get the best from the system. Developing imaginative questions that keep the interest of the students when going through a large data set is important. However, several staff can help build the bank of questions.

This type of system could be extended to include the clicker system for interactive feedback during the lectures.

The bank of questions could be made available to the students throughout the whole semester so they could take charge of their own self-development

The questions could be made more interactive to promote even more learning . For example, model questions and answers could be provided. If needed, a question could give immediate feedback initially to suggest ways the student could think about it the question and get it right next time.

A further possibility is that exams could be performed using the Questionmark Perception system, although that would have to be in a closed lab under supervision, for authentification.

Related Resources

References:

More information on Questionmark Perception is available from the University QuestionMark Perception Support Web Site

More discussion on using QuestionMark Perception can be found in these papers as well:

Shulman, D. (2008) Questionmark Perception. The Internet and Higher Education, v.8 (3), p.263-267.
Velan GM; Kumar RK; Dziegielewski M; Wakefield D. (2002) Web-based self-assessments in pathology with Questionmark Perception. Pathology, v.34 (3), p. 282-4.

Pedagogy:

Responsible Learning

Flexible/Self-Paced Learning

Feedback-Feedforward

Technology:

Online Testing