Yacapaca

The core of the Yacapaca mission is to take as much of the drudge work out of teaching as possible, to leave you free to actually teach. After you have run a quiz, Yacapaca presents you with automated gap analysis*. Here is how to use it.

From the Assignments tab, click on the title of any quiz that has results.

You will see a straightforward gap analysis chart with up to 6 keywords analysed, according to how the author has set up the quiz. In the example below, you can immediately see that understanding of Memory and Clock Speed is weak in this student set. You can immediately re-address these issues, or you can dig deeper.

Click the “Per-question gap analysis” button and you get a list of all the questions in the quiz, with the percentages selected for each option. In the example below, you can see the only thing the class was reasonably sure of was that ROM was not the answer. The very high 12% timeout (average is 1.5%) also indicates a lot of confusion about this question.

Now the really big time-saver: the questions analysis whiteboard. Access this either from the top of the quiz analysis page, or from Assignments tab -> Results -> Analysis Whiteboard. Throw it up on the class whiteboard and you get an animated list of questions that sorts itself by overall score. Click on any item and you get an animated presentation of the question that you can use as a tool to tease out the students’ misunderstandings.

Finally, there is an individual gap analysis for each student.

Assignments tab -> Results -> Activity log provides you with  a colour-coded column indicating the grasp of each key concept by each student, along with other really useful information.

As a teacher, you have a dozen strategies to address the gaps once they are identified. I would like to suggest a few that I have seen be effective:

1. Use the whiteboard already discussed above.
2. Create your own mini-quizzes to address individual key concepts. No need to have more than 5-6 questions.
3. Assign your quizzes in Mastery Mode and insist on evidence of daily attempts until mastery is achieved. Hand the responsibility of addressing weaknesses to the student.
4. Use the “Team quiz sandwich” using Yacapaca’s automated team creation:
   1. Pre-test
   2. Teams work together to address weaknesses
   3. Post-test with rewards for the team making the greatest progress.

*If you are the quiz author, make sure your quizzes are all keyword tagged. Manual tagging still outperforms our AI auto-tagging.