Repeat Administration of Online Quizzes

Amanda Simons

Repeat administration of online quizzes

My project looked at whether offering students (optional) multiple tries on quizzes could help boost mastery of learning objectives and/or confidence in their abilities. I offered 4 online quizzes throughout my Spring semester Cell Biology course, and gave students the option of retaking the quizzes up to three times. The “repeat” quizzes contained different questions but assessed the same content as the first version; however, the first version contained additional objectives that were not assessed in the subsequent versions. Thus, I could determine whether the additional attempts could further improve learning gains. Because of this, I was careful throughout the semester to align each question on a quiz or exam with a learning objective for the module tested. I realized along the way that some of my learning objectives were more challenging to assess than others, and I sometimes struggled to assess the objectives in meaningfully different ways on different versions of each quiz. In terms of data analysis, I’ve also struggled with the fact that there are some differences in outcomes between objectives that require lower-order vs higher-order critical thinking skills. I have a lot of data, and my statistics skills leave something to be desired. As a Biology Scholar alum, I’d like to practice keeping my data collection and data analysis simpler and anticipating challenges: my data was messier than I’d foreseen at several points. I’ve appreciated having this community to keep me on track with the project and receive feedback.

On the next page is a figure showing student responses to a survey from the end of the semester. Students who self-report as having chosen to retake the quizzes (an average of 2 or greater attempts per quiz) do show an increased confidence in their learning outcomes compared with students who chose not to retake the quizzes. Interestingly, this is across the board among all content-based outcomes, even those that were not assessed via quiz.

References

Butler, A.C. (2010). Repeated testing produces superior transfer of learning relative to repeated studying. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36(5), 1118-1133.

Karpicke, J.D., Roediger, H.L. III. (2008). The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning. Science, 15(319), 966-968.

Larsen D.P., Butler A.C., Roediger H.L. III. (2009). Repeated testing improves long-term retention relative to repeated study: a randomized controlled trial. Med Educ,43, 1174–1181.

McDaniel M., Wildman K.M., Anderson J.L. (2012). Using quizzes to enhance summative-assessment performance in a web-based class: An experimental study. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 1, 18-26.

Figure: Repeating quizzes correlates with greater student confidence in learning outcomes. Students were given the choice of repeating low-stakes quizzes administered online throughout the semester. Before the final exam, students were asked to complete a survey that reported the number of times they took each quiz as well as their confidence in 16 different content-based learning outcomes. Students who chose to retake the quizzes reported moderately greater confidence in content-based learning outcomes, even those outcomes that were not assessed via quiz.

(* = p<0.05 via unpaired t-test.)