I just finished reading an excellent article about feedback in education, and what makes it more or less effective.
John Hattie and Helen Timperley, "The Power of Feedback", Review of Educational Research, March 2007, Vol. 77, No. 1, pp. 81-112 DOI: 10.3102/003465430298487
The article summarises a large amount of the evidence that has been collected in the literature over the years (see, for example, Table 3). It then presents and discusses a model of feedback to enhance learning (Figure 1). The authors argue that feedback is most effective it must answer three questions (for the student and/or the the teacher):
- Where am I going? (What are the goals?)
- How am I going? (What progress is being made toward the goal?)
- Where to next? (What
activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?)
(Those questions are interrelated.) Also, feedback operates at four levels which are more or less effective depending the situation:
- the level of task performance,
- the level of process of understanding how to do a task,
- the regulatory or metacognitive process level, or
- the self or personal level (unrelated to the specifics of the task).
(The last of those is generally not effective.)
There is a lot of great discussion about all that, and how it relates to the evidence, so I recommend this article if you are interested in this sort of thing. There is certainly good stuff here for thinking about how to why to build and use Moodle quizzes and other activities.