How to create and run a Quiz Assessment in Canvas

In Canvas, a Signal Assessment is a native Canvas assignment. You build the questions in Signal, Canvas decides who it goes to and when, and students open it from Assignments like any other piece of work.

When to use it: After a lesson or at the end of a week, when you want students to work through a set of hinge questions in their own time and want the results back in Signal.

This page covers the Canvas-specific workflow. For what an Assessment is and how to get good questions out of it, start with how to create and run an Assessment session. Everything there applies here too.

Creating the Assessment

Assessments are not created from the Nurture Signal item in your course navigation. They come from Canvas Assignments.

1. In your course, click Assignments.
2. Open the ⋯ menu on an assignment group, or at the top of the page, and choose the Nurture Signal option. The wording depends on how your IT team set it up. It may say Create Nurture Signal session, Nurture Signal assignment or just Nurture Signal. You are in the right place when the screen that loads is headed Assessment Sessions and has a Create new button.
3. Any Assessments you have built in other courses are listed here. To reuse one, click Duplicate and create next to it and Signal copies it into this course as a new assignment. To start fresh, click Create new.
4. Give the session a name and a display name. The display name is what students see.
5. Describe the session in the AI generation box: year group, subject, topic, the learning intentions and the subtopics you covered during the week. The more specific the prompt, the less editing afterwards. The prompt used in the video is below.
6. Choose how many questions to generate. Three is enough for a quick check. For work students do at home you will usually want more.
7. Set the due date here. Signal passes it through to the Canvas assignment, so set it now rather than editing it in Canvas afterwards and the two stay in step.
8. Under settings, decide whether to Shuffle quiz & poll answer options. Shuffling gives every student a different answer order, so students working alongside each other cannot simply compare letters. The correct answer stays correct; only its position changes. Leave it off if you want every student to see the same order.
9. Click Create. Signal generates the questions and creates a draft assignment in Canvas. Nothing has gone to students yet.

Year 10 Geography - Coastal Management in Iceland

10B, 24 students, mixed ability.

Learning intention: explain why Iceland's coastline is difficult to manage, and evaluate the responses used to protect settlements and infrastructure.

Topics that will be covered:

- Why this coastline behaves differently. Iceland sits in the path of high energy North Atlantic storm waves, and much of its southern coast is black basaltic sand rather than rock. Glacial rivers and outburst floods deliver enormous volumes of loose volcanic sediment to the shore, so the coast is constantly being rebuilt as well as worn away. Sediment supply here comes from inland volcanic and glacial activity, not only from erosion of the coast itself.

- The management problems. Erosion threatening the village of Vik i Myrdal and the road and services that connect it. Longshore drift moving volcanic sand into harbour entrances, most visibly at Landeyjahofn, where the ferry harbour needs repeated dredging to stay open.

- The responses and their trade-offs. Sea defences, groynes and rock armour to hold particular stretches of coast, and ongoing dredging to keep harbours usable. Each response protects one place at a cost somewhere else or as a permanent expense. Land in parts of Iceland is also rising as glacial ice thins, so relative sea level change is not the same everywhere along the coast.

Checking the questions before anyone sees them

The assessment opens in draft, so you can adjust it before it reaches a student. Each question shows its correct answer and an AI-written explanation. Students only see the explanation after they have submitted.

• Edit a question. Open its ⋯ menu and click Edit. Quick options such as Increase difficulty rewrite it in one click, or type your own instruction, for example to pitch it at a younger year group, and Signal rewrites the question from that.
• Reasoning. Each question can make the reason field Required or Optional, or hide it. Keep it required. A student can pick the right answer by guessing; their reasoning is what tells you whether they understood.
• Add questions. Add as many as you like. Open answer questions are also available, still in preview for some accounts, where students type a short, developed or long response against a model answer. They are not hinge questions, so they are less useful for checking understanding, but Signal can generate feedback on them. See creating open answer questions.

Confidence and reflection

Two steps sit after the last question. Both can be turned off, but keep at least the confidence step on.

• Confidence. After the last question, students choose Not confident, Neutral or Confident and write a short comment, at least 50 characters, on anything they found tricky. When they submit, Signal shows them which answers were right and wrong, with the explanations.
• Reflection. Students then reflect knowing what they got right and wrong. Choose Open reflection, What? So what? Now what?, Gibbs’ cycle (five prompts) or 3-2-1 (three things learned, two connections or surprises, one question they still have). Their score stays locked until this is done, which gets students into the habit of reading the feedback before chasing the number.

Assigning and publishing in Canvas

1. When you are happy with the questions, click Assign & Publish. You can Preview as participant first if you want to see it as a student would.
2. Canvas opens its usual assignment settings. A few things to know:
   • Description can stay empty. Signal does not use it.
   • Points defaults to 100. Leave it as it is. Points are a Canvas setting and do not change the questions or how Signal marks them.
   • Submission type must stay as External Tool, which is already filled in. Do not change it.
   • Submission attempts is a Canvas setting Signal does not read. Students get one attempt in Signal whatever you set here.
   • Due date is pre-filled from what you set in Signal. Leave it unless you have to, so the two stay in step.
   • Assign to works as normal. Assign to everyone, a section, or individual students. That is how to send an easier version to one group and a stretch version to another: create two assessments and assign each in Canvas.
3. Click Save & Publish. The assessment is now live for the students you assigned it to.

What students see

Students open the assessment from Assignments, or from their Canvas to-do list. Canvas shows the due date and points as it would for any assignment; the quiz itself is the Signal panel embedded in the page.

They answer one question at a time, explaining their answer where reasoning is required, then rate their confidence and submit. Signal marks the answers, shows the explanations, and asks for the final reflection. Clicking Unlock score reveals their result.

Tip: Canvas may still list the assignment as not submitted, and it does not count attempts, because the submission happens inside Signal rather than in Canvas. The submission is recorded in Signal.

What you see as the teacher

Back in Signal, results are question by question: who chose what, and the reasoning they gave. Where a student has typed something like “I guessed” or “I don’t know”, Signal flags it as a potential guess or a low-effort explanation. This only affects your read on understanding: in that teacher-facing analysis a guessed correct answer counts as half, so it does not inflate the picture of what the class understood. The student is unaffected. A correct answer is still marked fully correct for them, whatever their reasoning. See why does a correct guessed answer count as half.

The Confidence and Reflection views show how students rated themselves and what they wrote. Once everyone has submitted, Insights shows a grid of correct, partially correct and incorrect answers across every question, and you can open an individual student to see their confidence, reflection and answers together.

The other session types

A Live Quiz looks much like this on the teacher side, with numbered questions plus confidence and reflection, but it runs live in class from the Nurture Signal tab rather than from Assignments. Engage is different again, with everything in one timeline. See how to access the three session types in Canvas.