Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Ahmed Salem
Once the students finish taking the quiz, the result is posted to their sets’ screens. If the student did
not get a satisfactory result, s/he would have to redo the training again and to take a makeup quiz
later on according to the class preset agenda. The makeup is graded at a lower grade than that of the
original exam. This helps the student to fill any gaps in their constructed knowledge representation,
while emphasizing the importance of getting the right answers at the first offering of the quiz.
6.5 Reading indicators
Once the students finish the quiz, the results is instantly made available to the teacher. An Excel
sheet at the teacher computer is automatically populated by the SQS with the students’ grades.
Figure 3 below shows the design of the full learning experience as per (Salem, A. Z. (2011)) and the
utilization of the SQS in both the Input and Process phases. For a two hours session at the
comprehension level in an engineering design course, the input phase is selected to have two hours
long activities, and the output phase is selected to have four hours long activities.
Figure 3: The input, process, and output phases of the learning experience
6.6 Applying or modifying the learning experience
According to the students’ performance, the teacher would know for sure how ready are they for the
Comprehension level activities designed for the remaining of the class time. If the results show they
are ready, then the activities can take place as designed. At the end of the class the students would
take another comprehension level quiz to show how much progress they have made. The result for
such quiz is shown in section 7 below.
If the results show they are not ready yet, a redesign of the class activities may be needed to raise the
students’ readiness before conducting the class’s original design.
7. Results
A study was conducted for two semesters, using qualitative and quantitative methodologies for data
collection and interpretation to measure the effect of this tool on students’ attitudes and performance.
Two control groups were selected each semester – one is using this tool to prepare for the class and
the other isn’t – to the experiment. Each group is 60 students strong per semester and are given the
same comprehension level quiz.
The results for the collective performance of the two semesters (120 students) for each group are
shown in Table 1 below. These results are of the end-of-class comprehension tests for both groups.
The grades are given in industry job performance evaluation form namely: Exceed Expectations (E),
Meet Expectation (M), Need Improvement (NI), No Credible Effort (NCE) and finally No Submittal
(NS). This categorization is shown in the left column in the table. At the right most column, is the
criteria for each category.
As can be seen from Figure 4, the study showed positive effects of this tool on both attitudes and
performance in favour of the first group. The results are leaned more towards the left of the chart
where they showed shear improvement in the grads.
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