Yacapaca

If you are a fan of Mastery Learning  you are going to love our latest feature.

When assigning, you will find the setup dialog has changed slightly. There is a new item “Mode”.

When you change this, you see

• Formative Mode is the system you are used to.
• Mastery Mode is new.

In Mastery Mode, students are allowed one attempt per day until they pass the threshold of 80%. The quiz re-appears in their to-do lists every day until then.

The daily restriction is critical to using quizzes as a learning tool. When a student takes a quiz, some of the answers will be committed to short-term memory. Subsequent immediate attempts will usually produce a higher score, but that learning then evaporates as short-term memory is re-used for other things. To be of value, the learning must be committed to long-term memory.

Mastery Mode prevents you, or the student, being fooled by short-term memory effects. To pass the 80% threshold, the student must commit the learning to long-term memory. It also provides some degree of spaced practice to help them do this.

I recommend Mastery Mode when setting homeworks or using Yacapaca for revision. It is not appropriate for end-of-topic tests or for baselining.