Usage and Tips - adaptlearning/adapt-contrib-assessment GitHub Wiki

To Do: Add bullets describing situations Assessment is good at addressing.

In Adapt an assessment is a group of questions resulting in a single score. It differs from a mere group of several question components in that it offers additional functionality:

• the scores from the separate questions are combined
• a passing score is specified
• the assessment score may be passed to the LMS
• assessment progress may be restored from the LMS
• "banks" may be established from which questions are drawn
• randomisation may be introduced to the selection of questions

To set up Assessment,

1. Plan
   1. Determine what performance factors need to be assessed and which question components are best suited for measuring them.
   2. Keeping in mind that randomisation works by shuffling blocks, assign question components (and any presentation components such as Graphic needed for reference) to blocks.
2. Implement Assessment
   1. Create an article dedicated to the assessment. If you are working with the framework, add the Assessment JSON attributes.
   2. Add your blocks & components to the article.
   3. Configure options: feedback, quiz banks, randomisation.
3. Display Assessment Results
   1. Add Assessment Results to a block that is not assigned to the same article as the assessment.
   2. Configure the reporting bands and feedback.

• Sometimes, it's not enough to just set pass or fail assessment feedback—a learner who's scored 79% might need different advice compared to a learner who's scored 35%. Use the scoring bands in Assessment Results to associate particular feedback with certain performance ranges. You can set as many bands of feedback as you wish.

• While measuring performance as percentage value is very common, it is not the only method. Scoring bands and pass mark can be configured to use question points. This is can be achieved by allocating a score value per question in the assessment and then setting the pass to occur once a predetermined score is achieved.
  For example, assume we decide to allocate questions the following points depending on the complexity:
    ○  simple questions might be allocated 0.5 points
    ○  normal questions 1 point
    ○  complex questions 2 points
  Let's say there are 10 questions per level of complexity, and the pass mark is set to 20 points. Achieving a pass now involves two factors: the number of questions answered correctly and the complexity of the question. A pass may be achieved by correctly answering a high number of the more simple questions or a lower number of the more complex questions.

• You can have as many question banks as you need and these can hold as many questions as needed. Using the split property, you can configure the assessment to take any number of questions from each bank. If there are more questions in the bank than you need, it will choose them randomly. The order of these questions will follow the order of the question banks. But if you want them to be presented in a random order, you can shuffle them before they are displayed by setting randomised banks to 'true'. You can even randomise the order of the question options as well when you configure the question component.
  
  You might have a bank of questions for each learning objective within your course or perhaps you’re using banks to hold and then randomly serve up a variety of simple, normal and complex questions as per the point’s example above. If you wanted an even more advanced assessment you might have three banks per learning objective to house the different question levels, configuring the difficulty of the assessment by both the pass mark and the mix of question difficulties being taken from each pot.

• Randomisation is done at the block level so keep this in mind when structuring your assessment. If you want to present randomised individual questions then keep them to one per block. If you need to present a graphic along with a question for it to make sense, assign them to the same block. It is the only way to guarantee that the two will always be presented together.

• See the documentation on Trickle for some tips on how you can add this plugin to Assessment to good effect.