Online quizzes not really helping students

WASHINGTON, USA: Online quizzes are not helping students learn their subject, according to a new study.

Harm-Jan Steenhuis and Brian Grinder of Eastern Washington University, Spokane and Erik Joost de Bruijn of University of Twente, The Netherlands, have shown that for students of operations management course, online quizzes are not as useful as some educators might think.

Information and communications technologies (ICT) in the educational environment fall into two distinct categories. In the first, ICT is used for instructional purposes. In the second, for testing.

In this latter category, online quizzes are increasingly popular as tools for testing student knowledge and skills and also as formative tools to help teachers mould the curriculum to fit the learning progress of the students.

By adopting this latter approach, educators hope to improve student knowledge and grades.

However, Steenhuis and colleagues have found that this approach does not necessarily work and despite the fact that students perceive such quizzes as helpful, they may not be as useful to learning as both students and educators believe.

The team investigated the behaviour and performance of students using online quizzes. They found that overall student grades were not improved by the formative online quizzes.

Moreover, despite answer controls and time delays built into the quizzes that were meant to encourage additional study between attempts at the quiz, the students did not modify their behaviour, said an Eastern Washington release.

These findings were published in the International Journal of Information and Operations Management Education.

©IANS