Self-Checks, Quizzes & Tests

Self-Checks

Self-Checks are a great way to lighten the feedback load on you as the instructor, yet still provide students regular feedback on where they’re at with course concepts and knowledge.

Self-checks are different from formal quizzes or tests in that their purpose is to help students see where they need to improve or increase their study efforts rather than to formally assess student knowledge. For this reason, plagiarism isn’t as high of a concern in self-checks, and you can even set them to not be included in course grades.

Typically, self-checks are set to allow multiple attempts. If the checks are graded, only the highest grade is sent to the Canvas gradebook. Limiting the amount of time students have to take the self-check will reduce students’ tendency to look up answers and provide more accurate information to them about their level of knowledge of a topic.

You can provide feedback per question in a self-check or per answer item in each question. The amount of feedback you provide is up to you, but if you know specific questions will cause issues with students, that may be a place to focus more energy in providing that automated feedback. In order to improve the effectiveness of self-checks, help students learn from their mistakes by explaining in a little more detail why a particular answer choice isn’t correct.

Self-check quizzes use the same tools as formal quizzes/tests in Canvas. The Canvas guides below explain how to adjust the settings of quizzes and add questions.

Additional Resources

Quizzes and Tests

Quizzes and tests are common features in online courses. Canvas makes it very easy to add questions, administer tests, and grade student work.

Self-checks are just what they sound like: a chance for students to check their own understanding of concepts in a course. Self-checks typically take the form of automatically graded quizzes and are worth either no points or a small amount of points. When you don’t see your students once, twice, or three time a week, self-checks may be the only activities that clue you in to student misunderstandings.

Canvas allows you to input feedback for all answer items in quizzes, which gives students valuable feedback on specific concepts.

Because this feedback is automatically generated as soon as students finish the quiz, it helps to lighten your load as an instructor while still providing just in time feedback to your students on their progress.

Writing good test and quiz questions can be a very time consuming task, and can feel endless as you work to increase your test question pools and update questions from semester to semester.

Here are some general tips and strategies for writing test questions to ensure that the questions assess what they’re supposed to assess and to help cut down on student complaints about questions:

  • Write questions as simply as possible so that reading comprehension isn’t the focus of the question
  • Make sure that each question has a single correct answer or best answer
  • Avoid trick questions that mislead students

True/False Questions

**Due to the 50/50 nature of true false questions, you should limit their use on your tests as the likelihood of students guessing the correct answer is very high (50%).

  • Ensure the item is unequivocally true or false
  • Avoid using qualifying words like “all” in questions, as most of these questions will be false
    • Example with qualifier: All parasites cause harm to their hosts.
    • Better: Toxoplasma gondii parasite is one of the world’s most common parasites.
  • Avoid the use of negative statements and double negatives
    • Example with negative: Comma splices are not caused by missing commas
    • Better: Comma splices are caused by missing commas
  • Limit true-false statements to a single idea
  • Include approximately the same number of true statements as false ones

Multiple Choice Questions

**Include at least three answer options. Increasing to four or five answer options reduces the probability of students guessing the correct answer

  • When setting time allowed for multiple choice questions, keep in mind that the longer students are given to answer questions, the more time they have to guess at the right answer. If students already know the answer, they need much less time to answer each question.
  • Include as much information in the stem of the question as possible. If each answer choice repeats the same words, include those in the question.
  • Be sure there is only one correct answer
  • Be sure that wrong answer choices are equally attractive to students
  • Don’t use “all of the above” or “none of the above” as answer choices may be shuffled in Canvas

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