A crowd-sourced approach to exam questions
A School of Education seminar presented on October 28th, 2015 by Paul Denny
Most instructors are familiar with how challenging it is to create good multiple-choice questions with plausible alternative answers. But what happens when students generate their own questions, targeting the material they are learning, and contribute them to a shared repository where they can be answered, rated and discussed by their peers? It turns out there are many interesting answers to this question.
This talk will present the pedagogical motivations for having students build and moderate their own repository of questions using the PeerWise web-based tool. The repository serves not only as a drill-and-test library that students can use for practice, but also as a creative medium for engaging students in critical reflection and deep learning. A summary of existing research will be presented, and the talk will conclude with a look to the future.
About the speaker
Paul Denny (Computer Science, The University of Auckland) created PeerWise as a result of a deep interest in supporting collaborative learning, particularly involving student-generated resources. In 2009 PeerWise won the Australasian Association for Engineering Education Award for innovation in curricula, learning and teaching. PeerWise is now used at 1500 universities and schools around the world, hosting two million questions with associated explanations and discussions, and tens of millions of student answers. Paul is a recipient of the National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award (2009) and the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia Teaching Award (2010).
