Project Cleo: Students Reading the News Gary Simpson ABS270

Project Overview Aim: “To get students to read business stories in a quality newspaper and weekly news magazine” Why: To improve the standard of their English and knowledge of business How: A weekly news quiz for 4 weeks which contributes to the assessment of a core module.

What We Did Students subscribed to daily newsfeeds from the FT and weekly from the Economist. Each Monday we published a ten question quiz on the previous weeks news

An Example Quiz Question’s where composed by a team to a standard format. We generated between 20 and 30 questions per week.

What Went Wrong! Everything! Problems with access to FT articles Problems with emails from Economist Problems with Internet Explorer Problems with Chrome and Firefox Complaints about the amount of reading Complaints about language ability Complaints about the time allowed to complete Complaints about the penalties for taking over the 10 minutes Almost nobody did the questionnaire on previous reading habits!

What Is Cheating? Sharing the questions with someone else. Sharing the answers with someone else. Googling the answers while doing the quiz. Creating a word document in which you have the text of all the news stories which you search for key words from the questions. Saying the internet crashed and asking for another go.

What We Learned Lots of practical things about how to set the ground rules of online tests for summative assessment. No resets but give best X of Y tests as mark. Have strict penalties for going over time. Make sure your questions assess the skill what you want. Life is easier if it is formative assessment but only a minority will do it. 79 did not even look at example quiz 170 looked but did not attempt the questions 91 properly did the example People complain if you stretch them.

What We Learned