Online quiz benefits questioned

Washington, January 21 (ANI): Online quizzes may not be of great help to students in learning, a new study claims.

Experts have questioned the benefit of online quizzes introduced to offset larger class sizes allowing students to self test and educators to evaluate student performance with reduced effort.

The researchers have demonstrated that for students undertaking an operations management course, online quizzes are not as useful as some educators might think.

Information and communications technologies 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, Harm-Jan Steenhuis, of the College of Business and Public Administration, along with 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.

After investigating the behavior and performance of students using online quizzes, they found that overall student grades were not improved by the formative online quizzes.

In fact, 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 behavior.

The researchers said: "Our conclusion raises questions about the use of online quizzes as an effective course design element to improve student learning."

Also, a comparison of the exam results and final grades showed that there was no significant difference between the course that used online quizzes and the one that did not.

The study has been published in the International Journal of Information and Operations Management Education. (ANI)