Formative Quizzes and the World Wide Web

The use of quizzes delivered and marked by computers is a long standing well tried technique for helping people learn. This paper gives the rationale for, design of, and experience with, a system to deliver and mark formative quizzes using the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW solves many of the logistic and delivery problems associated with computer delivered quizzes, and makes them easily accessible to a large number of people. The paper discusses the design of a WWW system to deliver quizzes to students. It outlines the advantages and potential of the WWW for this task and discusses problems and trade-offs compared with other approaches. It reports on our experience with giving quizzes using a system at the City University of Hong Kong. Creating questions is a time consuming, difficult task. It is hoped that the quiz system will provide a mechanism for question authors to share questions, thereby spreading the load of question creation and development