Weekly Micro Quizzes
Date: 18/05/20
Will Swaney
Summary
Will Swaney introduces his continuous assessment and an innovative way of creating statistical data on his research skills and employability module to increase student motivation and engagement.
Further Information:
Subject Area:
Animal Behaviour, Biology Wildlife Conservation and Zoology
Level: 5
Class Size: 200 to 250
Links:
- Link to further details on Will’s module
- Link to details about Canvas quizzes
- Link to more information on using Microsoft forms
Keywords
Assessment, Data, Quizzes, Statistics, Student Engagement
Case Study:
Assessments are broken down within the animal behaviour course, so that 10% of marks are allocated to online weekly graded quizzes. This allows Will to monitor engagement and the level of learning throughout the delivery and helps him pinpoint particular students who are struggling or not engaging. It also allows students opportunities to apply and test their knowledge using quizzes to build further confidence in applying statistics.
Each quiz consists of three questions which are randomly drawn from a pool of questions. There are nine weekly quizzes in total which means each quiz is worth one point 1% of the final grade.
Students evaluate the module very positively and this has grown over the years. You can see in the graph above students have grown in their level of confidence over a three year comparison.
In addition to this Will is also using an online spreadsheet tool and survey system to encourage students to gather and input data about themselves anonymously. This data is then used by the whole group within statistical analysis tasks. The aim of this being to provide students with data and analysis questions which are relevant to them and their fellow students. Some of the data analysis can be carried out on the students’ mobile phones and analysed in class.
