Understanding the type of Assessment doesn’t involve only the actual types of questions and answers, but also how the learner will approach each content. While a final exam may seem stressful for one person, the very same person can pay little to no attention when they feel that there are no stakes at all involved.

In order to stimulate different reactions to our Assessments, it’s important we as educators understand these reactions and how to better formulate our questions.

In Cox Campus, there are two types of Assessments to be created. Though they can use similar tools and approaches, they are different in nature and purpose.

Let’s go through each one of them. Don’t worry, we will go through how to actually build each one of them in the next lessons.

Quick Note

u003cpu003eIt's important to note that we will use the term Assessment from now on when referring to the menu in Cox Campus' LMS, fully aware that these may encompass not only assessments themselves, but also exercises and quizzes. The term will be capitalized to make this distinction clear.u003c/pu003e

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Practice mode:

The first one is the Practice Mode, which focuses on validating and guiding the learner through the learning process. These types of Assessments are perfect to reinforce the content taught in the previous lesson or to ensure that they’ve assimilated what was taught. These two aspects are done in the following ways: to reinforce the content to ensure it was assimilated by the learner.

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1 – To reinforce the content taught, the practice mode should instigate the learner to apply the content or knowledge in a different context than what was seen. This is the perfect way to test if they can transfer their knowledge in various examples, other than what was specified in the lesson.

To do so, it’s imperative that the question is not written in a rigid way where users are merely confronted whether they understand or not the concept, but instead they are encouraged to think, evaluate and elaborate on their thinking.

For example, if the lesson is about driving laws, instead of simply asking which of four sentences is the correct one regarding a law, the learner is encouraged to think about a fictional situation and what would be an appropriate approach.

You can do so by using the Sorting Assessment type in LearnDash from most appropriate to least one. That way, there isn’t one single correct answer, but a myriad of options the learners can choose from. Then, on the feedback, you can guide them through your train of thought on why each option is in the order it is, providing further context to them on the next questions.

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2 – To ensure what they have assimilated, practice exercises should be created in a straightforward way, such as a right/wrong question. For example, using the same example from before, a driving law lesson, you can confirm they clearly understand what a law is, or they can sort different rules and their punishments.

The main difference from a typical End of Course Assessment is that they are instructive in nature, not punitive or evaluating the learner’s knowledge. To achieve this approach, plain instructions on the question statement and insightful feedback in the end should be given to the learner.

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End of Course Assessments:

The second type of Assessment is End of Course Assessments, which are meant to evaluate the learner and their learning process. These are right/wrong questions, meant to assess whether the learner has learned or not the content and understood it fully (or at least 80% of it).

The main difference between these and the Practice Assessments is that End of Courses is a high stakes type of exercises. The learner will approach it differently and may stress over minutiae when reading each statement and option; thus clarity is imperative. Furthermore, since no feedback is given, the learner should be able to re-read the questions and evaluate where they got it wrong, or at least investigate.

In Practice Assessments, for example, sometimes there are tricks you can pull on to make a question dubious in order to instigate thinking and reasoning. While ambiguous questions may be somewhat accepted in questions where there are no stakes involved, these will certainly not be expected in final Assessments.

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We will go over how to build each type of question in detail as we go along in this document.

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