teaching - Are automated online quizzes effective for formative feedback to students

I would like to increase my use of formative feedback (feedback showing students whether they understand material correctly without impacting their grades) and would like to integrate it with online quizzes.

I'm wondering if this has been found to be effective.

My goal is to make it simple and automated. While I could write one myself (school generally does not pay for things like this), I would prefer to avoid building it (or paying). What I'm really looking for is something like forms in Google docs but would also somehow automatically and instantly score the answer (limiting student answers to multiple choice) and displaying the results to the student as soon as the submit button is pressed.

So, this is a compound question: Does using online auto-scoring quizzes help students (I believe it will) through formative feedback and is there a way to get Google forms to give immediate results?

Answer

Does online quizzing help?

Yes. Some references are listed below. Auto-graded quizzes with no points will help motivated students self-regulate their learning. Of course, those students are the ones most likely to succeed. If you assign some small points then students who are more likely to postpone studying will develop better habits.

Can Google Forms give instant results? Well, quick and easy results, but not instant results, using scripts. The K12 education world is more nimble with free LMS options. Many teachers use the script "Flubaroo" to grade the form answers within Sheets, and then the script "Autocrat" to automatically send emails. I'll let you google for the latest blog posts and youtube videos on these scripts.

As best I can tell, you may need to manually trigger the process after each quiz ends. But perhaps that's a good excuse to check student answers and see how they are doing?

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References:

Bälter, O., Enström, E., & Klingenberg, B. (2013). The effect of short formative diagnostic web quizzes with minimal feedback. Computers & Education, 60(1), 234-242.

Kenis, R. M. (2011). Effects of Scheduled, Unrecorded Quizzes on Students' Self-regulated Learning.

Olson, B. L., & McDonald, J. L. (2004). Influence of online formative assessment upon student learning in biomedical science courses. Journal of Dental Education, 68(6), 656-659.