Yacapaca

Go to your Assignments List and you will see a colour-coding key across the top. 

Here is what they each mean. Do follow the embedded links if you have time; I have written extensively on each of these in the past, so this is really just a set of headers pulling all that together.

Formative-mode Quiz

Formative mode is the default for any quiz you assign. After answering each question, students will see formative feedback, and have an opportunity to participate in creating new formative feedback statements for future students. By default they will have two attempts at each quiz because this motivates them to read the feedback.

Exam-mode Quiz

Exam mode matches a paper exam. No feedback, not even to tell you if you got it right or wrong. Just answer, then bang onto the next question. Use sparingly.

Mastery-mode Quiz

How Yacapaca supports Mastery Learning. The same formative quiz you get with the standard mode, but students must attempt the quiz once (only) per day until they hit the mastery threshold – 80% by default, but you can change this. How to assign it here and how to master it here.

Homeworks are depreciated in favour of Revision, so I won’t cover them here.

Revision

Allow to select their topics to revise, then have Yacapaca algorithmically select questions that are appropriate to ability. If you have specified subject and syllabus for a student set, Revision links will appear automatically at the top of each student’s to-do list. To see what revision they have actually done, look in Results-> Activity Log. You must set a clear expectation that it will be done, or it won’t!

Quick Assignment

Almost every assignment a teacher gives their students can be described as “broadcasting information to students, then getting multiple responses back”. QAs give you the convenience of getting that through Yacapaca. Covered in Tutorial 3.

Offline Assessment

Do you want to use the Yacapaca Gradebook to keep all of your grades/marks? Here is where to enter grades earned from non-Yacapaca assignments. You will be prompted to use this occasionally for another reason: there is an algorithm that statistically compares your students’ Yacapaca grades to their offline grades, and uses this information to measure the real difficulty level of each quiz, thus making the internal percentage-to-grade calculations more accurate.

Structured Peer Assessment

SPAs allow students to grade each others’ work by contrasting anonymised responses from their peers. Not only does it produce remarkably accurate grades with no work for you, it also produces the most powerfully formative feedback I have yet seen.

Read next – Tutorial 5: The Gradebook