So your students have taken their quiz, read the feedback, got the score. What now? Most likely, you want students to fill in the gaps in their knowledge that the quiz has revealed. Here are the 5 tools we have built into Yacapaca to help them do just that.
1. Gap analysis
The very simplest. Click on any quiz in your Assignments page and you will see something like this:
This shows how well the whole class did, broken down by key concept. Here you can see they are strong on databases, for example, but weak on hardware. Share this with the class, and/or use it to plan activities that address the gap directly. N.B. Not every quiz is tagged for gap analysis.
2. Analysis Whiteboard
This brilliant interactive tool allows you to pick out specific questions you want to discuss with the whole class. Read more about it here.
3. Students’ Evidence Log
Accessed from the students’ action menu, the Evidence Log provides students with a key-concept gap analysis of their own performance. The numbers to the right are simple percentage scores.
Not every key concept listed is useful to the student; some of them (e.g. “J276-2” above) were created to help quiz compilation. Train your students to cherry-pick the useful ones. In the example above, the student should be able to pick out that search algorithms are their top priority.
Students sometimes ask why they have not been given access to the per-question results. The reason is that we do not want them succumbing to the temptation to rote-learn just those answers, and then fall flat on their faces when the questions in the exam are different. Key-concept revision is far more robust.
Pro tip: if you print the Evidence Log, it comes out in plain black text on white: not the white on black you see on screen. Big toner saving – though if you really want to be kind to environment and budget, you encourage students to work direct from the screen.
4. Evidence Download
If you are one of those teachers who loves getting right into the data, we have each student’s evidence log available for you to download into your favourite spreadsheet. Go to Gradebook -> Actions -> Evidence. Be aware that it can take a little while to download a complete class. When done, the data looks ugly but is available to use in 100 ways:
5. Teams
Teams are where you pull all these threads together. Instead of expecting disciplined self-motivation from every student, harness the power of peer pressure! Assign with Teams in the first place, then using the mesmerising animated Teams Whiteboard to motivate students during each quiz.
Now here’s the trick. After the first attempt at a quiz, get your students together in their teams, with access to their Evidence Logs so they can see, discuss and research their strengths and weaknesses. Give them a few minutes, then run the quiz again, this time with prizes for the most-improved team. To supercharge their motivation, instil into them this mantra: the winning team will be the one that best supports its weakest member. The reason being that this is the student with the most points still to gain.
Not every tool works for every class, but having them all in your teacher toolbox gives you a set of tremendously powerful options to take your assessments way beyond the purely summative. Yacapaca will deliver the biggest boost in results when it is used formatively, to clearly identify gaps in learning and target them explicitly.
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