Yacapaca

There are three major, and several minor, results pages in Yacapaca. Ordered by level of detail, the major pages are the Gradebook, Activity Log and Detail.

Gradebook

This is your overview for a complete student set, for a whole year or more. It can function as your one-and-only gradebook for a class, or to play nice with an external gradebook by accepting grades from external sources, and exporting data in CSV format.

As well as showing quiz, homework and revision results, you can manually add grades from any assignment, or include grades from an uploaded Quick Assignment.

The cells of the grid are colour-coded according to the assignment type and the grade earned. More on that here.

By default, the Gradebook shows 12 months-worth of grades; this can be changed with the filters at the top of the page. The data is sorted horizontally by due date and vertically by either forename or surname. Thanks to some very clever programming, the centre data section scrolls independently so you can view a lot of data on quite a small screen. The example above actually has 100 students and 25 assignments. On your iPad or other multi-touch system, a 2-finger touch will scroll it very smoothly.

Note the Target field on the right hand side. If you set a target grade for each student, this will then be represented in a flightline chart accessible on the far right.

Mouse over any column to see the name of the assignment. Click on any column to drill down to the next level; in the case of a quiz, that’s Results (see below)

The Actions menu at the top right gives you access to most of the things you can do with a student set. That is too much detail for this overview post, so I will just leave you with a wee screenshot.

There is a lot more to learn about the gradebook; try this blog search for starters.

Activity Log

The Activity Log page shows the results of quizzes only. It consolidates multiple attempts into a single row and gives data you can use in a single glance.

The most obvious feature is the colour-coded Key Concept bars. How useful these are depends entirely on how well the questions in the quiz were tagged by the author. Where they are done properly, they give you and instant view of what the students have ‘got’, and what they’ve not got. In the example above, you can instantly see they know ‘how’ but not ‘why’. You can get this information from the Detail view (below), but sometimes there you can’t see the wood for the trees.

I will detail just three other columns:

• Average time per question interestingly does not correlate with student ability. Look out for very fast answering (they are not thinking, and therefore not learning) and very slow answering (they are probably watching YouTube in another window, and neither thinking nor learning).
• Confidence. The ideal student scores close to zero here, because their predicted score closely matches their actual. They have realistic self-evaluation. Negative numbers show under-confidence; positive numbers show over-confidence.
• Improvement. How much did they improve between the first and last attempt? If you encourage a “study sandwich” with pre- and post-tests, you will see large values here. Two runs back-to-back will generate very little improvement, and what there is will quickly be lost.

You can export these results to a spreadsheet, too, using the Download button.

Detail

The detail view shows the exact response to each presentation of each question.

Mouse over a question heading to see the question.

Mouse over a response to see the text of the response(s). This example is from a checkbox question in which the student checked three options.

At the right hand side is the score (percent only) for each attempt. Across the bottom (not shown) is the average score for each question. A question with a very low average score may be something they don’t know, but could equally be a badly-written question, so it’s worth checking.

Activity Logs for homework and revision

Homeworks and Revision use CAT streams in which each student gets a unique set of questions directed at their particular needs. The activity log for these is necessarily somewhat different from a quiz activity log.

…which drills down to a Results in Detail page.

Between them they give you more detail than you will want on most occasions, but just sometimes it does really help you to understand where a student is at.