One of the huge benefits of using the Moodle Quiz activity, particularly when there is a focus on remote-learning, is its provision for immediate feedback to students; this feedback can range from specific feedback (granular feedback dependent on the answer given to a question) to overall feedback on a student’s general performance in the quiz.

Feedback can be particularly useful when using the Quiz for formative assessment. For summative assessment, you may not wish to show any feedback to students but perhaps just share a grade – unsurprisingly, appropriate configuration will also allow for this.

This post will focus on the different feedback available along with how to determine which – and when – feedback will be made available to the student.

Question settings

‘General feedback’

When adding a question, irrespective of the question type that you select, you will be able to define ‘General feedback’; this is feedback which can be made available to the student regardless of whether they get the question right or wrong. Potentially this feedback could be used to direct students to further resources relating to the topic that the question was about.

Specific feedback

In an earlier post, I looked at different question types; these behave in different ways but, for many of the different question types, it is possible to define specific feedback dependent on the answer that the student has given.

The example below shows the ‘Specific feedback’ for a ‘True/False’ question type:

In the above screenshot, the correct answer is False. Feedback A will be shared with the student if they answer the question incorrectly, whereas Feedback B will be used if the student answers the question correctly.

Quiz settings

‘How questions behave’

In the Quiz settings, the ‘How questions behave’ setting in the ‘Question behaviour’ section determines when to mark and give feedback on questions being answered:

From my experience, Deferred feedback (the default setting) tends to be by far the most popular choice as it will display grades/feedback once an attempt has been submitted by the student.

Other options include:

• Immediate feedback – allows students to “lock in” their answer to a question and have it marked as they progress through the questions during the quiz attempt (displaying feedback at this point, if configured as such in ‘Review options’ – see below).
• Interactive with multiple tries – allows students to check their answer and to retry the question for a defined number of times if they have not answered correctly.

More information about these – and the other options – can be found on the ‘Question behaviours’ page (Moodledocs).

‘Review options’

The ‘Review options’ in the Moodle Quiz activity determine which feedback, if any, will be made available to the students and when.

To choose to display feedback, grades etc, you simply tick the checkbox next to the relevant option(s):

• During the attempt (1) – If you have selected Deferred feedback for the ‘Quiz behaviour’ setting earlier, these options will not be enabled as no feedback elements are displayed during an attempt, they are deferred until after an attempt has been submitted. For other ‘Quiz behaviour’ settings these determine what will be displayed when the Check button has been clicked next to a question;
• Immediately after the attempt (2) – determines what will be displayed immediately after having submitted a quiz attempt;
• Later, while the quiz is still open (3) – If you choose to review a previous quiz attempt (and the ‘Close the quiz’ date has not been reached), this defines what will be displayed;
• After the quiz is closed (4) – If you choose to review a previous quiz attempt (and the ‘Close the quiz’ date has been reached), these are the feedback elements that will be displayed.

A full explanation for each of the checkbox options can be found on the ‘Quiz settings‘ page (Moodledocs)

‘Overall feedback’

‘Overall feedback’ can be displayed once a quiz attempt has been submitted and graded.

It is possible to specify different feedback depending on what score the student achieved for the quiz attempt.

In the example above, any attempt scoring:

• 70% or above – will receive the upper-most feedback (A);
• 50%-69% – will receive the middle feedback (B);
• less than 50% – will receive the lower feedback (C).

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As you can see, there are many ways places where feedback can be defined and also controlled when using Moodle’s Quiz activity – giving you granular control to suit whatever your needs, be it for formative or summative assessment.