Introducing “Mastery Quizzes”: Turning assessments into learning experiences
Alec Kretch is the founder of OpenClass — build mastery-based assignments around your content to reinforce learning at OpenClass.ai.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of our second product at OpenClass, “Mastery Quizzes.” Mastery Quizzes complement our Mastery Review Assignments to provide a low-stress form of assessment that enhances learning.
This product was birthed by brainstorming, “what’s wrong with traditional tests?”
- They’re highly stressful: tests are often a large percentage of a student’s final grade.
- They offer zero immediate feedback: tests are often returned to students 4–6 weeks after they’re taken, when it’s too late to learn from them.
- They’re infrequent: two or three large tests throughout a course encourage cramming, an ineffective studying technique.
The next question was, “what’s the purpose of traditional tests?”
- To rank students: standard classes need grades, and tests are an easy way to rank students by quantitative performance.
- To promote in-class attention and post-class studying: tests serve to scare students into giving effort.
- To get feedback on instruction: while traditional test results are often not actionable due to the issue that they can take a long time to grade, tests do allow instructors to get a pulse on how well their classes understand the material.
Traditional tests are not all bad. Encouraging effort and receiving feedback on instruction are positive elements. But how can these positive elements be retained, or even improved, while ridding the negative elements?
After months of workshopping this concept, we landed on the following format for Mastery Quizzes:
- Students must achieve a high-level of accuracy on multiple-choice questions for full-credit (85% by default): students have some wiggle room to miss questions and still prove they’ve mastered the material.
- Students that fall short of this threshold can review targeted feedback and change their answers for half-points back: students that haven’t mastered the content yet have a chance to learn from the feedback and critically re-think their solutions.
- Additional options exist to enable “retrieval mode” (asking questions as free response questions before the options are shown), partial credit for students that fall short of the threshold, and time limits: this allows mastery quizzes to fit any class type and serve as pre- or post-class assessments.
Mastery quizzes are low stress, incentivize effort, and encourage learning. Further, they’re lightweight, easy to build, auto-graded, and offer detailed metrics on student performance to give instructors instant feedback on what their students understand.
At OpenClass, we’re focused on rethinking education and building products that improve the way people learn. Mastery Quizzes are one more critical piece to the puzzle.
Start building Mastery Quizzes today at OpenClass.ai. Free support, get started guides, and student walkthrough videos are available. Contact alec@openclass.ai for help!
