The circumstances this year led me to rely more heavily on computer-assessed exercises as a method of student learning, and pushed me to try an idea I had been toying with for some time: upon submission of their computer-assessed quiz, give the students their marks, some feedback, and then let them try again, only their last quiz counts. My audience was a second year linear algebra module of 250 students. In this talk I will describe the design of these quizzes, an analysis of the marks and student feedback, together with my own reflections. Despite unlimited attempts, and multiple-choice questions, the answers were more difficult for students to figure out by “brute force” than by carefully reading the feedback (i.e. learning the material!). The downside of this design was the initial cost of creating sufficiently many variants of each question. Students were extremely positive in their praise of these quizzes and their pedagogical value.
Resources
- Slides (.pdf) (.pdf)
- Slides (.pptx) (.pptx)