This week I’m focusing on a new feature in Canvas. Canvas will be replacing their current quiz feature by the end of the year with a new one named, appropriately enough “New Quizzes”. They’ve already opened it in Canvas, which is great because it will give users plenty of time to transition before the current quiz feature disappears.
One thing to note as you begin trying this out. If you have created a bank of questions in the current version, it will not currently work with the new version. Canvas has said they are working to connect the two together and their goal is to have this working by the time the older version goes away. However, that does not mean you can’t make new question banks with the new version. You just can’t pull questions from the older banks if you choose to use the new quiz feature. I’ll share a little later how to make new banks and how you can migrate quizzes from the old version to the new version.
I’ve already played with the new quiz feature a bit and overall I really like it. There are many other question types to choose from and they correspond well with Technology Enhanced Questions that are found on the SOL’s. If you are watching Tech Tuesday from outside of Virginia, on our state standardized tests there are questions beyond the standard multiple-choice or true and false type questions. These ask students to Drag and Drop answers or select multiple correct answers.
The new question types include ordering, categorization, hotspot, and stimulus. Fill in the blank has also been updated. Fill in multiple blanks, multiple dropdowns, and text (no question) options are no longer question types you can choose from. If you’ve used multiple dropdowns on older quizzes, they will migrate over as a matching question type.
Here’s how to create a quiz with New Quizzes:
Instead of clicking on Quizzes in the left-side navigation, you will go to Assignments. At the top of the page, you will find a button labeled Quiz/Test. Fill out the assignment page as if it were any other assignment with your number of points and the date you will be giving the quiz and click save or save and publish. You will be automatically brought to the quiz window no matter which one you choose.
The first thing to add is your instructions for the quiz. Then we need to add some questions! Click the blue plus sign to add questions and select your question type.
Now, the next part is a little tricky if you don’t know the difference between Question Title and Question Stem. According to Canvas, question titles are optional and are not visible to students. I think this would perfect if you wanted to add this question to a bank, to add the topic or what the question is about in this spot, so it’s easier to identify when pulling it from the bank. So if the question covers “Conflicts between American settlers and Indian nations in the Southeast”, an actual topic covered in US History, you could put something identifying this in the question title.
The actual place you want to put your question is in the question stem. Then the next step is to add your answer choices.
This information is good for most question types, however, depending on the one you choose, a few things can change, such as being able to add additional categories or answer choices. It’s also good to know that each question type gives you different options, such as allowing for the use of a basic or scientific calculator. This is also where you can add questions to a bank, which I’ll go over further in a minute. I encourage you to play around with some of these features or use the Canvas Help Guides to learn more.
Now that you know the basics in creating questions, let’s go over these new question types. I’ll start with fill in the blank since this has been updated. For this question type, you will type the entire statement, including the word you want to be in the blank BELOW the question stem in an area labeled Type a Statement. Then highlight the word or phrase that should be in the blank and hit enter on your keyboard. The word or phrase becomes a separate entity and when viewed by students will have a blank line. Your answers can include open entry, where students can type the word, or choose the answers for the blank from a dropdown or a word bank. If students are typing in their own answers, you can also choose how closely the text should match, from close enough, exact match, contains and other options.
Our next question type is Hot Spot. For this question type, students will mark a spot on an image. This would work especially well with maps or number lines. The trick to this question type is finding the image you want first and then importing it into the quiz. Then you can use one of the selection tools to highlight the correct area. During my initial training
Next up is Ordering. For this type of question, you will put the answers in the correct order and when students view it, the choices will be automatically shuffled. Students will then click and drag the choices to the right order.
The categorization question type is fairly easy and allows you to create multiple categories for students to click and drag answers to.
And finally, stimulus allows you to add pictures, videos or links to articles that you can attach to multiple questions.
Let’s move on to question banks. There is only one place where you can add a question to a question bank, which in New Quizzes are called item banks, and that takes place towards the bottom of the options for the question you are working on. To add the question to an item bank, click on Item Banking, then the Add to Bank link. Note, that after a question has been added to an item bank, it can only be edited in the item bank.
To share an item bank, click on the Item Banks button at the top of the screen. A pop up window will appear and look for the name of the bank. Off to the right, you’ll share a link labeled +share. Click on this and enter the name of the person you are sharing the bank with and then click add and done. Everyone shared on the bank will be able to pull questions and add questions to the bank.
These next few tips will help you with setting up the quiz to assign to students or how to view results.
If you want to see what the quiz will look like, click on the preview button at the top of the screen. Make sure to click Exit Preview at the bottom, instead of the button labeled return. I made this mistake and it returned me to the list of modules in my Canvas course, not the quiz builder page, where I could continue editing.
When you are ready to assign this quiz to students, don’t forget to look at the quiz settings at the top of the page, by clicking on the tab labeled Settings. In this area, you can choose to shuffle questions, have one question show on the screen at a time, allow multiple attempts and other options.
The Moderate tab will allow you to view the assessment results and a detailed log for each student including who completed the assessment, which is off to the left, but I’ve cropped this to protect their names, their assessment attempts, the score and time for each attempt, and attempt logs. There’s also a place to “fudge points”, where you can manually adjust the score by adding positive or negative points. Kate Gilbride used the categorization question in a recent quiz and several students placed only one item in the wrong category, however the whole question was marked incorrect. This also happens with the SOL TEI questions, however, I understand that you may want to give students partial credit for what they got right. In moderate, find the student and click on the link for the quiz attempt. You’ll see only one item is wrong, yet the student received 0 points. This question was worth 15 points, so I can scroll down to fudge points and give them 14 points and then click on Update.
I will also say there’s a nice summary of results too under the Reports tab.
You’ll see two options, Quiz and Item Analysis and Outcomes Analysis. I had to look up what Outcomes are and had wondered if our state standards would work here. It’s something different all together and would need to be added to all courses within a district and is definitely something we don’t use, so we’ll click on the other option.
This first chart shows the overall assessment scores and other options such as the highest and lowest percentage score, the Mean Score or average percentage score, and the average time to complete the assessment.
Below that is the item analysis, which measures such as things as the Difficulty Index showing how hard it is to answer the question correctly and other options. You can also click the drop down to see more analysis items.
The last item I want to share is on migrating your old quizzes to new quizzes, which is an easy process. Click the Quizzes link and find the quiz you want to migrate. Click the three dots next to the quiz name, then select Migrate. Your quiz will be placed in the Migrated Quizzes assignment group. To view this, click on Assignments from the left-side navigation, and scroll down until you see a section labeled Migrated Quizzes.
That was a lot of info, so thanks for hanging in there with me! When I first introduced new quizzes to the high school staff, I also promised that there would be an online professional development session for those who wanted to learn more. It’s now finally ready! In fact, I’ve created an entire Canvas course for Digital Professional Learning that will house any online sessions offered at either the high school or middle school. I am planning for both self-paced and guided online sessions this school year.
Here’s the link to enroll and get started: https://mpcs.instructure.com/enroll/949XFP
So that wraps up another episode! Thank you for watching and I’ll be back soon with a new episode on Google Tips and Tricks!
Ms Priester EDU 