Adaptive Activity: Personal Practice
Personal Practice activities are adaptive, formative assignments that generally appear at the end of a module prior to its paired summative assessment. These activities provide students with personalized practice to prepare them for the assessment.
As a student works through a module and answers formative questions, the platform generates a learning estimate for each relevant learning objective. As the student completes the Personal Practice activities, the platform delivers questions determined by his or her learning estimate.
Students receive feedback as they answer questions, which helps them prepare for the quiz. Students' scores are based on the percentage of these assignments completed. Each student’s performance against the learning objectives in the module determines the questions that the activity delivers:
- Low-performing students see additional low- and medium-level questions that scaffold up to the core questions that all students receive.
- Mid-level-performing students see only the medium and core questions, but not as many questions as low-performing students do.
- High-performing students see only the core questions and not any scaffolded questions.
You can tag content to learning objectives and deliver that content only to the subset of your students who need additional support or remediation.
By default, Personal Practice activities are formative activities and therefore not graded. You can use the Course Settings to make these activities gradable.
Note: Data show that students who complete these adaptive activities perform better on module quizzes.
Scaffolding
Each Personal Practice activity contains core questions that all students receive. Students who have struggled with the material receive additional questions and content that scaffold up to these core questions. The scaffolded questions help lower-performing students prepare for questions that are similar to questions they may see on the quiz. If students begin an activity before they've done any work in the module, they will not have any learning estimates related to that content, and they will receive all the available questions.
Below is a side-by-side view of the questions generated by these activities for two different students. On the left is a high-performing student; she receives four questions on this page of this sample activity. On the right is a low-performing student; he receives eight questions total (not all shown on this page), including additional questions and content that the high-performing student does not receive.
Personal Practice