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User:Guy vandegrift/WikiEd/Wikipedia and quizzes for introductory college courses

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Introductory college courses are often called xxx-101, where xxx can refer to Astronomy, History, ect.. Such courses are typically taken by first and second year students who do not intend to major in a field related to that subject. The Wikipedia articles appropriate for introductory courses are highly developed and not suitable candidates for a Wikipedia:Wiki Ed project for such students. The extension is not currently available on Wikiversity or Wikibooks, which host many pages that could be effectively edited by students in these introductory courses. These same pages (on Wikiversity and Wikibooks) are often not of sufficient quality to serve as "textbooks" for introductory college courses.

  • This proposal discusses the utility of adding quizzes to Wikipedia articles. For a mechanism by which Wikiversity can be used to organize this effort, see:
Wikiversity:Wright_State_University_Lake_Campus/Mock_Course_1010

Tentative conclusions

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  • The best way for introductory college courses to use Wikipedia:Wiki Ed might be to write quizzes for basic articles on the subject, and then place sister-links out of the Wikipedia article into classroom-ready quizzes that teachers can use. As an example, the following can be printed in such a way that the page breaks preserve continuity of questions. Note the use of multiple versions for classroom use:
Wikiversity:How_things_work_college_course/Turing_machine_quiz/Testbank/mirror
Wikiversity:File:Quizbankdatabase_htw_Turing_machine.pdf
  • The ideal platform for this activity is likely to be through Wikiversity instead of Wikipedia. There is currently no analog of Wikipedia:Wiki Ed on Wikiversity, and efforts to evaluate the use of this extension are underway.

Improvements that must be made

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These quizzes need to be improved.

  1. Software to better print out copies of the quizzes: The software used to convert these quizzes into printable classroom tests is described at v:Quizbank. While this software manages to print out multiple randomized versions with proper page-breaks, it is primitive. There are no immediated plans to imporve this software until a bank of questions of sufficient quality have been produced.
  2. The quiz questions need to be edited: In true wiki fashion, the quizzes were quickly written and need to be edited.
  3. We need to solve the memorization of answer problem: The advantage of an open source bank of exam questions is that students can't cheat by asking students who previously took the course to share their exams. Unfortunately, it is clear that the most time-efficient strategy for students seeking a good grade is to simple memorize the questions. This can be alleviated by introducing short essay questions that correspond to nearly each multiple choice question. It could also be alleviated if a component of the course required that students submit their own muliple choice questions. Also, students could be required to improve summaries of the article that reside on Wikiversity. These summaries would focus exclusively on the questions in the quiz bank.

Solving the cat-and-mouse problem

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The costs of college education can be reduced without harming quality by creating large introductory courses that are not labor intensive. This will allow us to focus our resources on the more critical advanced courses. A open source bank of exam questions is one way to economize on the introductory courses[1]

The daunting problem with an open source exam bank involves a Cat and mouse game that instructors must play with fact-based multiple choice exams. They need to tell students what to study without telling so much about the exam that they simply memorize facts. It is not sufficient to simply create a vast exam bank because some students strongly favor memorization as a learning strategy.[citation needed] Nevertheless, this problem can be alleviated using a number of strategies:

  1. On each multiple choice exam, give the students a list of questions and ask them to explain them in a short essay. For example, place a sentence like this at the top of each printed exam:
    On the back of the last page write an essay that addresses two of the following questions: 3, 5, 11.
     Classroom exams often need to be printed in two versions to prevent cheating by adjacent students. It is a simple matter to assign differnt questions for the diferent versions of the test.
  2. Automatically subtract 2 or 3 questions from the number of wrong answers, so that getting 28 out of 30 questions gets the same grade as a score of 30/30. The strong students don't need to waste their time memorizing every fact. (Then use the essays associated with the previous mechamism to bring down the scores)
  3. Ask students to contribute their own questions using Wikiversity. Or, ask them two write study guides that explain the questions in the study guide as a writing assignment. Place these study guides on Wikiversity, and assign students the task of improving them.
  4. One component to the "Cat and mouse" problem is that students would prefer to study exam questions to reading expository prose. The aforementioned activities will force students to at least look at the articles. An alternative strategy involves surrendering on the effort to get students to read, and instead base the quizzes on videos that students are required to view on campus. This has limited value because it wastes valuable face-to-face time between student and instructor. But two or three such videos in a one-semester course could comfortably fit into most course outlines. See for example this quiz based on a video from Season 42 of a recent PBS:Nova documentary.
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The effort to introduce Wikiverity quizzes has been underway for about 2 years. For more information, see Wikiversity:Quizbank. The following quizzes have been linked out of Wikipedia articles, always in the External links section. The quizbank currently holds 766 questions in 84 quizzes, but most of them are not linked to out of Wikipedia.

Parallel effort with randomized numerical physics problems

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References and footnotes

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  1. ^ Another cost-saving measure would be to incorporate peer-review writing assignments. These could be spot graded for quality. See v:Wright State University Lake Campus/Mock Course 1010
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