Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Ahmed Salem
Figure 2: The Simple learning experience design model
6.1 Pre-class reading
The students have to join a collective pre-class reading session. This would take place one or more
days before the class. In this session they set in teams and every team is given a jigsaw reading
exercise. Every member would have to read and thoroughly understand a small portion within a
certain time, and then educate his/her fellow team members on this portion. The same reading
material is given to every team in the session.
6.2 Knowledge and comprehension levels quiz composition.
Upon finishing of the jigsaw exercise on the assigned reading materials, the teacher would assess the
successfulness of this exercise by asking some members of every team to recap what they were
taught by their fellow teammates. If the answers are correct, then the exercise was successful. If not,
the teacher would have to push in the right direction, without giving the full answer yet, and let the
students try again to refine their jigsaw, until they get the right answers.
After the jigsaw exercise is deemed successful, every team member would have to generate (in
written quiz’s question format) two questions on the portion they red. They present their questions to
the team and then to the class to omit repeated questions among teams. Upon teacher approval of
the questions, the students pair their sets with the server to submit their questions. This reinforces the
students’ feel of both belonging and the share of power (Maryellen Weimer, (2002)).
The teacher would have now collected a new addition for the quiz’s bank. Then the students can get
this portion of the quiz bank on their sets to practice at their homes for the coming class.
6.3 Quiz training
After the class the students can spend as much time as they need to play around with the SQS that is
fed with their quiz prototype. While this could be a small portion of the quiz bank, it is fully
representing the material they have to be acquainted with. The students download a default version of
the quiz initialization file that can control their training and adjust the timing of the quiz.
Practicing with the SQS out of the class, gives the students the chance to accurately assess their
mental model representation of the knowledge they will be exposed to and modify it if needed.
6.4 Conducting the quiz
The students take the quiz as the first activity in the classroom. They have to pair their sets with the
teacher’s to get their encoded version of the questions. The SQS generates an encoded (can’t be
opened to see the answers) random set of questions for every student according to the teacher’s quiz
initialization file, while maintain the overall difficulty level in balance by using the question difficulty
indicator. For instance, if the teacher set the a certain level of difficulty for the quiz in the initialization
file, the SQS will make sure that the average of the question difficulty indicator for any set of
questions that is generated for a certain student almost matches this level.
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