Moodle: Activities & Resources: Adaptive Quiz

The Adaptive Quiz is an activity that allows instructors to create quizzes that measure and adapt to the test-taker's ability and knowledge while they are taking the quiz. The quiz will auto-select each next question in real-time, which is more or less difficult depending on the student's answer to the previous question.

Because this quiz is adaptive, there are several requirements for building this activity. In general:

1. The question pool must contain a minimum number of 25 questions for this quiz type to begin being effective. A higher number of questions will increase the accuracy of the quiz.
2. All questions must be tagged with a difficulty level. See below for more information.
3. Difficulty levels must be consecutive numbers.
4. There must be multiple questions per difficulty level.
5. The starting difficulty level for the first question should be in the lower one-third.

The adaptive quiz produces a score that shows the user's ability measure and the standard error for the attempt. This score can be shown to students in addition to a traditional quiz score. Instructors can view textual and graphic analysis for each attempt in the Review attempt area.

To Add an Adaptive Quiz: 

1. Login to Moodle and select desired course.
    
2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Create Learning Activity.
   
   
    
3. Select Adaptive Quiz under the all or activities list of Add an activity or resource menu.
   
   
    
4. Type in a Name for the adaptive quiz, add clear instructions to the Description, then complete the settings. You will need to select the Question pool(s) that will be used (see below on creating question pools), set the Starting level of difficulty (this is recommended to be in the lower one-third of the difficulty levels), set Lowest level of difficulty, and Highest level of difficulty. Personalize the Stopping conditions which include a minimum number of questions, a maximum number of questions, and a standard error to stop. When finished, click Save and Return to Course at the bottom.
   
   Note: The quiz will also stop if one of the following conditions is met: no remaining easier questions or no remaining harder questions.
   
   
   
    
5. The adaptive quiz will then appear in your selected topic section.

Building Adaptive Quiz Question Pools

Questions used in adaptive quizzes must be tagged in the question bank with a difficulty score. All questions must be tagged as adpq_n, where n is a positive integer. The range of the scale does not matter. However, each level does require items to be added.

All questions must be auto-graded types and award full credit. Questions that award partial credit will not work in an adaptive quiz. Questions can be in the category selected in the quiz settings.

Resources

For more information on using an adaptive quiz activity, read the following documentation. The Moodle plugins page explains the calculations involved in finding the student's ability measure and standard error for each attempt.

Note that the documentation does not show the SNAP Theme, but the functionality of the settings is the same. All links will open in a new window.

• Moodle Plugins: Adaptive Quiz
• GitHub Middlebury College: Adaptive Quiz