Feedback in Brightspace Quizzes

Andrea.T.735

We all know the value of giving learners descriptive feedback. As educators and instructional designers, we also recognize that there isn’t always time to write detailed, individualized feedback for every assessment. Sometimes an auto-graded quiz is necessary. But this doesn’t have to be an either-or dichotomy; the Quizzes Tool in Brightspace allows us to build descriptive feedback into quizzes. This lets us take advantage of the time saved by auto-grading and support our learners with descriptive feedback at the same time, particularly when paired with an answer key for questions that need to be manually graded.

All question types can have feedback added at the question level in the Quiz Builder. Multiple Choice, True or False, and Multi-Select Questions can also have feedback added for each individual option. This means learners will see different feedback depending on which option they chose when taking the quiz. This is powerful, as it allows us to tailor the feedback learners see to their mistakes without needing to write detailed feedback for each individual learner.

This feedback can also be easily edited or added to when manually grading the quiz. Overall feedback for the whole quiz can also be added when appropriate. Writing a sentence or two of overall feedback or tweaking pre-written feedback to align with a learner’s individual mistakes takes much less time than writing detailed feedback for each response.

To take advantage of this feature, you will have to set the quiz to display questions, either all the questions or just the incorrect ones, with or without correct answers, to learners when published. If this option (found under “Evaluation & Feedback” in the Quiz Builder) is set to “No questions,” the feedback will not show up for students.

Here are a few examples of how adding feedback to your quizzes adds value for both educators and learners.

• Quiz A contains a multiple choice question that has several opportunities for mistakes. The distractors have been written to align with some of these possible mistakes. Feedback added to each of these options explains the most likely mistake if learners arrive at that answer. If learners choose the correct answer, they see the feedback, “Great work!”
  
• Quiz B contains a true or false question. The correct answer is true. If learners select true, they see the feedback, “Great work!” If learners select false, they see the feedback, “Not quite. Visit Page Title to review the concept.” This directs learners to review exactly what they need to be successful on the next assessment.
  
• Quiz C contains a series of written response questions. The quiz has been set to display incorrect questions without correct answers to learners when the quiz is published. Each question has been built with feedback attached that briefly explains the correct answer and directs learners to where in the course they can find more information. While this still requires manual grading, the instructor can simply quickly manually grade each answer, and when learners review their quiz, they will see the feedback only for the questions for which they did not get full marks.
  
• Quiz D contains a series of written response questions. The quiz has been set to display all questions when published. Each question contains feedback that includes pre-written feedback for correct answers and common mistakes. When grading, the instructor removes the feedback that does not apply and adds one sentence of overall feedback indicating the most common error on the quiz. This allows the instructor to provide personalized feedback quickly and efficiently.
  

How might adding feedback to your quizzes help you and your learners?

John.T.67

Couple of questions …

1. Can instructors import quizzes into Brightspace from 3rd party sources? If so, please suggest resources that explain how to do that.
   
2. Can feedback such as “Great work!” be randomized from a pool of possible feedback comments for specific scores?