Practice makes better: quiz retake software to increase student learning

Abstract

In the past few years, we have made several pedagogical changes to the way we teach and assess student knowledge in our courses.These courses are undergraduate software engineering courses taken in the third or fourth years, and graduate (non-research) courses taken as part of a master’s degree. They are taken by software engineering majors and computer science majors. This paper focuses on a specific technique–allowing students to retake weekly quizzes.We use weekly quizzes to offer more frequent, yet lower stakes,assessments than the traditional midterm exam. Quizzes are usually given at the beginning of class meetings. We offer students who under-performed or who missed a quiz the chance to try again. A major contribution of this paper is a description of scheduling soft-ware we developed to facilitate the retake process. Retake quizzes are different from the original quizzes, but cover the same material and are of similar difficulty. Our goal is to improve student learning and retention. This paper presents a post-hoc retrospective analysis of student performance on retake quizzes. In such a scenario, only limited conclusions can be drawn. Nonetheless, we see encouraging signs that students not only achieve higher overall scores when retaking quizzes, but that some students perform better on the final exam.