Science Teaching with Moodle 2.0

Create interactive lessons and activities in Moodle to enhance your students' understanding and enjoyment of science

(For more resources on Moodle 2.0, see here.)

One of the biggest things to come out of the UK in terms of modern education practice is Assessment for Learning (AfL). This is a phrase coined by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam in the late 1990s. If this is the first time you have heard the phrase "assessment for learning" then refer to:
Inside the Black Box: Raising standards through classroom assessment King's College, London. Black, P.J. & Wiliam, D. (1998).
It's a great place to start and a reference you'll regularly go back to, again and again.

Assessment for learning

Let's begin by looking at what good assessment is; then we'll go through how you can apply this to your Moodle course.

Assessment for learning informs you as to what your students have learned, gives an idea what topics, concepts, or areas they find hard and, most importantly, gives you and them an idea of how to improve.

Assessment can unfortunately have a negative effect on people. It can make a huge difference when students are involved in their own assessments, but serves very little purpose when it is used by pupils for comparisons or to boost ego. It is important for learners to understand the reasons behind assessment, whether it is to help them understand something, a summative test designed to award a level of competency, or just a quick review so they can see how they are doing.

It is vital, however, that all learners can 'do well' in assessments, which may sound contradictory. Progress is much faster for learners who are confident, secure, and happy with trying new ideas. Without that, little learning can happen. This may mean creating different levels of assessment for a particular task so that all pupils can access it.

Assessment comes in three main types—teacher/tutor assessment, self assessment, and peer assessment. The latter two will be covered in later articles. The focus of this article will be teacher assessment to provide feedback to students. In the next article, we will be drilling down deeper into the analysis of assessments to inform your teaching.

Feedback

The most important thing a teacher can provide is to let their students know how they are doing. Moodle is great for this. You could, for instance, create a multiple-choice quiz and give your learners detailed responses for every incorrect answer, even giving them a link to another resource or website that would help them learn from their mistakes.

The feedback cycle

The feedback cycle is something you could use when creating tasks designed to provide feedback to your students on their learning. The following image shows you the three phases of the feedback cycle:

Learning is a continual process of attempting tasks, finding out if you can do them, and then working out what you need to do to get even better.

If you want to find out more about the current teaching methodologies in the UK, there are some great videos and good practice at https://www.ssatrust.org.uk/Pages/home.aspx.

Using ratings in forums

It is important that students get feedback on their work. Without it, they will never know how to improve. This feedback could be from the teacher, by reflection after comparing their work to some criteria, or from their peers. This last reason is why, more often than not, it is useful to include some sort of ratings in the forums you set up, along with comments for improvement.

Why use ratings?

It can be a good idea initially to force pupils to use the rating systems in forums. To do this, you could set some specific homework, asking them to post their replies to a discussion point. It should require them to read and reply to at least two other posts, providing ratings and written feedback. Interestingly, pupils tend to be very fair and will often do much more than the minimum. It's a good idea to be quite specific when using ratings. For instance, what does 5 out of 5 actually mean? Criterionbased judgments give the learner a much better idea of specifically what needs to be done to improve. These criteria could be agreed on beforehand and form part of your forum introduction. Again, for written comments, it is best to be specific. "Great post" doesn't really help the learner much, apart from a bit of an ego boost. Of course, there are times where you may wish to do this but there is lots of evidence that it doesn't help their understanding of scientific ideas, (see Inside the Black Box: Black, P.J. & Wiliam, D. 1998).

You could ask your learners to suggest two things that were really good about the post, and one thing that could be improved. They should phrase the feedback "perhaps next time you could…". A polite suggestion, rather than a criticism that doesn't make the student giving the advice sound bigheaded. It's also good practice to get the person receiving the feedback to say "thank you", as it will encourage the person giving the feedback to do it more often.

Aggregate of ratings

In forums, there are five ways in which ratings are totaled (or aggregated), described as follows. These can be set by clicking on the edit icon alongside the forum link on the main course page.

• Average: This is the mean of all the ratings.
• Count: This gives you the sum of the number of posts. There are not many examples where this might be useful, other than to check that users have contributed a certain number of times.
• Max: This is the highest rating given for a persons post. Useful when you wish to get your users to display certain levels of competency.
• Min: It is the lowest rating given for a persons post.
• Sum: This is all the ratings combined to give a total. It is useful when you want to encourage participation and quality responses.This is different than count, as the total cannot exceed the maximum rating for the forum.

In a set up forum(download here -ch:2) we will set the aggregate type and give the rating a scale.

The scale chosen here gives a maximum of 5 for each post. Before setting this forum take the time to go through the scale and share a rubric with your learners, which explains what a post must include to be given a 1, or a 2, and so on.

It is usually good to show them examples of different posts so they get an idea of what makes a great post that is a 5. Another way you could use ratings is to use a scale to indicate how strongly the reader agrees or disagrees with the post. You could do this by creating a custom grade scale with words to represent the level of agreement. An example of this would be a scale that pupils can award the following values:

• Agree totally
• Agree somewhat
• Neither agree nor disagree
• Disagree with some points
• Disagree totally

Grade scales

There are two standard grade scales in Moodle. One is called Separate and Connected ways of knowing. It has the following choices that you could award for a discussion post:

• Mostly separate knowing
• Separate and connected
• Mostly connected knowing

A person who is in the 'mostly separate knowing' category has their opinions based on fact and is very objective.

A person who is in the 'mostly connected knowing' category is empathetic and tries to see the other person's point of view.

The other standard scale is called Satisfactory and allows users to choose from the following labels:

• Not satisfactory
• Satisfactory
• Outstanding

You can set up custom scales, which could be anything; grade letters, levels, or even colors could be awarded to posts to represent de Bono's Thinking Hats. Here is a link if you are not familiar with the concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats.

To set up custom scales, click the Grades link in the settings block followed by Scales.

Assignments

Assignment activities are a nice introduction to getting users submitting more traditional types of work on Moodle. They are very easy to set up and provide the added benefit of organizing all of the submitted work in one place.

There are a number of different assessment types that you can set up in Moodle. Some of these involve users submitting a file or files online, or even offline. There are:

• Online text
• Upload a single file
• Advanced uploading of files
• Offline

Think of an assignment in the same way you would have students hand in or e-mail you a piece of written work.

Online text

The online text assignment allows you to set up an assignment where your users are required to type or copy and paste their work directly into the browser. The really useful thing about online text assignments is that you can choose to be able to comment on their work inline. This means that you will be able to give them feedback that they can use to improve their work and resubmit it. However, if students are typing more than a paragraph of text there is the chance that the web page might timeout, so they would lose their work.

Like grading forums, you can also specify how many marks the assignment is worth, or specify a particular scale that the work will be judged against. A lot of the time a simple scale can be used to assess the piece of work, for instance unsatisfactory, satisfactory or outstanding. This would be paired with some detailed feedback for improvement.

The assignment that is going to be set up here will be for the third topic "movement in and out of cells". To add an online text activity, choose it from the Add an activity drop-down menu. This activity would be a lead up to an experiment investigating how osmosis acts on pieces of potato in sugar solutions. The aim here is to get your users to justify their predictions. You can follow these same steps to set up any activity in Moodle.

• As with all things in Moodle it needs a name and description.
• Set the activity available for one week although users will not be prevented from handing it in late.
• Use the Satisfactory scale for grading and allow resubmitting with comments inline.
• It's also nice to set the e-mail alerts to teachers to yes so that you will get an e-mail when a new piece of work is submitted. For this to work properly, you must remember to add yourself to the course as a teacher and also add yourself to a group.

Here are the assignment settings. The other settings can be left as standard:

As a teacher, if you click the link View submitted assignments at the top-right-hand side of the activity, you'll be taken to the screen where you can grade and comment on the work. It should look a little like the following image. You can also download all assignments as a ZIP file.

Upload a single file

The 'upload a single file' activity, as the name suggests, is an assignment where you require the user to upload a single file. This file can be nearly any format (as long as it doesn't pose a threat to the server). Let's take an example of how you can use this activity type in a very standard way. Later, you will learn to do this more creatively using the 'advanced uploading of files' activity.

Here are the settings that you could choose if you are asking your users to keep a food diary and submit it as an assignment. This is something that you would not give a grade for, just some written feedback. Again, the common module settings will be left on the default settings.

Advanced uploading of files

With this activity, you are able to specify a maximum number of upload files and there is a button labeled Send for marking that allows students to let you know when work is ready for marking. You can also set up draft and submission stages and it is the only assignment type where teachers can send back a file (for example, a Word document) as a response to the student.

If you are a fan of getting pupils to use their cell phones in science lessons, you could get them to video their experiments or take photos to include in lab reports. Given next are the settings to use for a video assignment:

Offline activity

The offline activity is really useful if you want to keep records of class work or assessments on Moodle. The set up is very similar to the other activity types, but allows you to input a series of grades using any of the different scales. So rather than keeping grades from bookwork or tests in a separate spreadsheet or mark book they can be stored in the gradebook in Moodle. This means that your students can refer to them at any time and like the other types of activity the users are notified by e-mail of any grade or comments that you give them.

For any assignment that you give, it is important to remember to let your students know what the marking criteria is that they are working towards. Students need to know what is good work, so you could even show exemplar work from last year as a resource that they would look at before attempting your assignment.