• Bb Assessment Advantages
• Bb Assessment Best Practice

Using Blackboard

The Assessment tool within Blackboard can be used for several purposes in your course. The benefits it provides include security for the students, flexibility in design, providing many types of question formats, and the fact that this tool grades the quiz or test (except the essay questions), and enters the score into the gradebook for you.

Many faculty are concerned about having students take a test online. There are precautions that you can take to address some of these concerns. You do have the ability to restrict access to the test. You can restrict the dates the test is available to the students. You can also set a time limit for taking the test.

Within the test there are also precautions you can take. You are offered the option to have the test randomly choose questions from a pool. Within a test, you can also randomize questions, and within a multiple choice question, you can randomize the answers.

There are 17 different question types in Bb allowing an instructor to create a comprehensive assessment piece for virtually any course. The many question types include everything from multiple choice to short answer and essay.

In addition to the types of questions Bb also allow you to use graphics as part of your assessment. For example if you have a course on art history, you can use images as part of the test.

This feature allows you to determine under what conditions a student will be able to see posted material. For example, if you want students to see a test only after they have viewed a presentation, you can format that as an “adaptive release”. Perhaps a student needs to have handed in a particular item before they can take a quiz. Again, that can be formatted. Adaptive release allows you to set particular criteria as to who will have access to certain material. This has several uses, one of the most common within the assessment area.

Once you have written your test, Bb can even do the grading for you. (However, if there are essay questions that must be graded by the instructor, the student is notified and the grade is not included until the instructor has graded those questions.) And while essay questions can’t be automatically graded, there is the benefit to not having to read a students handwriting.

Bb comes with a built in gradebook feature that can be configured to automatically capture the grades from the tests written in Bb. Once the test is graded, Bb will drop the test grades into the gradebook along with the rest of their scores.

Your students can also check their grades if you make them available. However, students can only see their own grades, not those of their classmates.

Bb Assessment Advantages

With flexibility in designing tests, to automatic grading, Blackboard's built in assessment tools allow you to stay focused on your students and not grading tests.

Bb Assessment Best Practice

There are any number of ways to build Blackboard's assessment tools into your course design, here are a few suggestions for getting the most out of what Blackboard has to offer.