It is frustrating to come into class ready to have great discussions with your students only to find out that just a few students did the assigned reading. Having students take in-class quizzes or write summary paragraphs of the reading are ways to help ensure students do the reading, but they take a lot of time and effort to prepare and grade, and they also cut into class time. So what’s another way to have the students come prepared to class having read the assigned text?
Blackboard’s “test” feature can help you with this. Built into Blackboard is a test creation tool that allows you to generate and administer self-graded test or quizzes. You create the questions, and Blackboard grades the tests. Then you can get an overview of what concepts your students are understanding and what might need some attention in class.
There are two steps to being able to get going with Blackboard test:
- Create your Test. Click here to learn how to start creating a self-graded test.
- Deploy your Test. Click here to learn how to deploy a test.
As you get more comfortable creating and deploying tests you might want to experiment with some more advanced features such as:
- Question Pools: You can create pools of questions that blackboard stores. When you are ready to create a test you can tell blackboard to use a pool of 30 questions to create a 10 questions quiz. Blackboard will automatically generate a test out of the questions in the pool and each student will get a completely different 10 question quiz.
- Make students take the test over and over until they get a certain grade.
- Deploy different test to students based on student grade.
If you have any questions or want to explore this further please contact the
CTL Academic Technology Office at (618)374-5530.
Christian Borja is the Director of Academic Technology for Principia College. He has worked at the College for 8 years. Besides working with technology, Christian enjoys spending time with his family and traveling.