Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Ahmed Salem
The SQS feeds from the question bank of the course on the course’s server. The server is
programmed to offer the quizzes through the SQS in the appropriate classes’ time slot according to
the course activities agenda, which is distributed to the students at the first day of the classes. The
student can run their local SQS on their local sets all the time for training purposes, however during
the class; they have to pair with the server to take the assigned quiz.
Once the SQS starts, it looks for an initialization file that is to be supplied by the teacher. If none
exists, it uses a default file. This file specifies the quiz allowable time, number of questions, number of
choices for every question, the number of figures associated with the questions and the required
BTLD for the quiz among many other quiz customization data as detailed in section 3 of this paper.
The SQS then reads from the quiz bank the designated quiz and its associated figures, and generates
a set of questions that both targets the predetermined BTLD (or a composition of them) and fulfils the
customization criteria according to the teacher setting. A random subset is generated from this set for
every student.
5. Automated self assessment technique
Assessment is an indispensible part of the design of the learning experience. It sheds light on how far
the students progressed for the teacher and provides them with the appropriate feedback on how
good was their performance (Fabry, V. J., et al. (1997)). In this tool, we also add an educative
component to it that informs the students instantly if his/her choice of answer was correct or not. The
right answer is marked in every question’s choices and the computer compares the student answer to
the correct one. The students would know the right answer after they provide their answer. The self
assessment mechanism that is installed in the quiz system is fully automated and is adjustable to
cater for the teacher goals (Wiggins, G. (1998)). Once the student answers the question, a verification
windows pops up with both the question and the student’s selected answer together, asking the
student to confirm her/his choice. If the student still hesitant they can opt to leave the verification step
and go back to think about the answer. If s/he is sure, they proceed with the verification and accept
their answer.
If they answer is correct, the grade is calculate automatically against the right answer and is reported
to the screen. Thus, the student has an instant feedback. If the answer is wrong, the program reports
to the screen also instantly. In this case, the program reports what was the right answers, so that the
student gets to know why what s/he thought is the right answers was wrong. This feedback is crucial
pedagogy for the students to help them rethinking the construction of the right representation of their
knowledge according to the constructivism theory (Chapman, D. W. (2000), and L. Dee Fink (2003)).
When the student finishes the quiz, a fully detailed report is written and the total grade it reported
automatically to the student’s screen and to the teacher on the system server. Also, an Excel work
sheet is initiated and populated automatically for the grades of all the students in the class. A
performance distribution curve is fitted to the histogram of students’ grads. This gives the teacher an
instant assessment of the class performance in the quiz.
6. How it works
The Active learning experiences considered here is designed according to the simple design model
(Michael, Joel A. and Modell, Harold I. (2003)) as illustrated in (Salem, A. Z. (2011)) were every
learning experience is composed of three phases: Input, Process, and Output regardless of its scale.
The entire Active Learning course is seen as such a model and every learning experience within it is
modeled as such also. Even if a learning experience does include several mini learning experiences,
each one of them is modeled also according to these three phases. Figure 2 (curtsey from Salem A.
Z., (2011)) illustrates this model. The input phase is for assessing the readiness of the students and
raises it if needed. The process phase is done mostly in class and the output phase is result (and
continuation) of the learning experience.
Consider a learning experience that is designed to help the learner to reach the Comprehension level.
It starts in the input phase by two steps. First, helping the students to achieve both the Access and
Knowledge levels and second, prepare them for the Comprehension level process that will take place
in the classroom. We focus here on the second step assuming that the first was successfully
completed. To prepare the student for the Comprehension phase we may suggest the following
design of the learning experience.
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