Abstract:

Nowadays, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have an impact on every aspect of our lives. The digital age has transformed the way people communicate, access information and learns. For instance, high school students are digital natives and self-taught. This trend becomes more pronounced every year due to the rapid update of ITCs. Consequently, students should be provided with contemporary experiences to allow them to successfully engage with the subjects.

However, it is still difficult to generate or adapt the learning materials to a digital and interactive format. One reasonable way of doing this is through quiz applications that test the knowledge of the students in an engaging way.

The benefit of using true or false tests for learning basic concepts has been analyzed by Bälter et al. (2013). In this study, the tests were performed by university students who were later interviewed about their experience. Around 40% of the students declared that this methodology helped them to evaluate better their knowledge and thus to modify their learning strategy in order to learn the concepts more appropriately. In addition, the teachers were able to detect the special needs of some students by analyzing the results of the test. In a similar study, Ćukušić et al. (2014) observed a positive effect of tests in the motivation and time investment of the students. Focusing on biology, Metz (2008) analyzed the usage pattern of self-evaluation tests among several student groups. The study concluded that tests are a useful tool to improve academic results by performing them as a weekly routine. Reid and McLoughlin (2002) evaluated the use of different types of questions concluding that short-answer questions are the more demanded type by students. However, only the preference of the students is not enough to guide the design of the questions.

For this study, we created Bioquiz, an application that runs on computers and mobile devices. The application can use any collection of questions and answers created by the teachers and present them to the students in an engaging way. Bioquiz supports images, time limits, a scoring system and several types of questions; namely, true/false, multiple selection or ordering according to some criterion.

Bioquiz was equipped with questions about the human digestive and respiratory apparatus which are subjects of the Spanish high school official curriculum. These questions were evaluated in two high school classes and with more than 60 students. The study aimed at analyzing the effect of question type on subjective preference, accuracy and task completion time. Additionally, the influence of text length and usage images is also analyzed. The results of analyzing this data will provide useful guidelines for designing questions for quiz applications.

References:
[1] Bälter O, Enström E and Klingenberg B. (2013) The effect of short formative diagnostic web quizzes with minimal feedback. Computers & Education 60: 234-242.
[2] Ćukušić M, Garača Ž and Jadrić M. (2014) Online self-assessment and students' success in higher education institutions. Computers & Education 72: 100-109.
[3] Reid N and McLoughlin C. (2002) Computer assisted assessment: Designing online quiz questions to assess a range of cognitive skills. In: P. Barker and S. Rebelsky (Eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications (pp. 1625-1630). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

Keywords:

Quiz, ICTs, Biology, high school education, mobile applications.