Yacapaca

We have always put great stress on the formative value of good feedback in Yacapaca quizzes. There is something about getting instant results that really engages the brain, and that creates a fantastic, but fleeting, opportunity to hit the student with an insight or challenge.

Sometimes this works, but sometimes it does not. I have observed in the classroom, that answering the next question is often more compelling than finding out why you got the last one right or wrong. Depending on the mood of the class, the feedback may simply not get read.

So, we’ve come up with an alternative quiz template, snappily called the “Feedback at end” template. It puts all the feedback at the end, after the student seen his or her mark. The hope is that it will engage that part of every young person that wants to scream “It’s not fair!” and demand a retrial.

Whether this will work better for you really depends on your personal teaching style, and the mood and tempo of the class. To give it the best chance, there are some rules I recommend you follow:

• Avoid using the template with any quiz that just gives the right answers as feedback. Neither learning nor valid assessment will take place.
• Set any test at least twice, and make students aware that the time between their first and second attempts is their best learning opportunity.
• Encourage students to pair up and discuss results between tests.

We will be recompiling some of our own most popular sets of tests to optionally run on this template over the next few weeks. If you are a Yacapaca author, it is already available for you to use. Meanwhile, I have created a four-question demo, embedded below.

For comparison, here is a similar test on the traditional “feedback per question” template. I would love to hear your views on which you would use when.