Timed Quizzes are a great way to deliver timed asynchronous assignments for the purposes of practice or summative assessments in Aktiv Chemistry. Here are some important steps, checks, and tips to be aware of before assigning your first Timed Quiz.
1. Don't make a quiz or exam your first required assignment
Aktiv Chemistry is an intuitive platform for students, but we recommend that no student's first exposure to the platform be under a time-sensitive or a high-stakes environment such as a quiz or exam.
Within an academic term, some instructors using the platform may plan to use Aktiv Chemistry for any combination of In-Class activities, Homework Assignments, Extra Practice, and Timed Quizzes. If this is the case, we recommend first assigning at least one planned assignment, such as a Homework, before your first Timed Quiz. This will allow students to first experience Aktiv Chemistry in a learning environment before the first Timed Quiz or assessment.
If you do not have any other planned assignments, we recommend creating a practice quiz before the first graded Timed Quiz. This can be accomplished by creating an additional Timed Quiz assignment with an appropriate name such as in the screenshot below. Providing a practice quiz will give your students some exposure to the Timed Quiz format in Aktiv Chemistry before their first high-stakes assignment. A practice quiz can always be excluded from a student's main quiz grade, but keep in mind that students will often need some incentive to participate in a practice quiz.
2. Explore Aktiv Chemistry's Question Bank
Aktiv Chemistry has a great selection of answer types including some highly interactive chemistry-specific types such as Dimensional Analysis, Smart Suggestions, and ICE Tables.
Additional Article: Finding Chemistry-Specific Answer Types
Aktiv Chemistry's Question Bank includes a helpful feature that marks what questions have been previously assigned as you work on new assignments, as seen in the screenshot below.
3. Check your Pedagogy & Grading settings
Aktiv Chemistry includes a number of settings for Timed Quizzes that prevent unwanted collaboration on assessments. We recommend enabling the Hide Instant Feedback setting to hide any answers and grading until all students have finished the Timed Quiz. By selecting Hide Instant Feedback, you then have the option to release Manually or at the Final Due Date. The next set of options are Consistent or Variable Question Points. You will want to use Variable Question Points when there are questions of varying time required to solve or difficulty. If appropriate, you can enable Randomized Question Ordering to scramble the order of questions for each of your students. Finally, we recommend enabling Algorithmic Problems to randomize numbers, words, or compounds within any algorithmically enabled questions. You can find algorithmically enabled questions by looking for the grey Algorithmic badge in the question bank per the screenshots below.
If you enable the settings mentioned above, your Pedagogy & Grading section should appear as indicated in the screenshot below.
4. Finding the right Time Limit
The Total Time Limit of your Quiz is also an important factor in preventing unwanted collaboration amongst students. Generally, we recommend giving enough time so that a student who has mastered the material can comfortably complete the quiz, but not too much more than that. Aktiv Chemistry helps determine the time limit by providing Suggested Times for each question in the bank and also tallies the suggested time as seen in the screenshot below.
5. Seeing the student experience
Even though Aktiv Chemistry's Suggested Times can be a good guide, we do recognize that every course and group of students is different. For this reason, we recommend previewing Timed Quizzes in a Trial course to make sure your Total Time Limit is appropriate. This can be accomplished using the following steps:
A. If you do not already have a Trial course in your Instructor account, create a new one by visiting the Course Menu and choosing Create New Course.
Additional Article: Creating a New Course in Aktiv Chemistry
B. Create and publish your Timed Quiz in your existing or new Trial course. This will allow only you, as the instructor, to see the Quiz. NOTE: You can always copy the Timed Quiz from another course. Additional Article: Copying Assignments
C. Use Aktiv Chemistry's View as Student mode under the gear icon in the top right to preview the Timed Quiz as a student in your Trial Course. You can view the screenshots below as a visual guide.
The Aktiv Learning team is here to help all instructors who need help when using the platform. For any general questions, email support@aktiv.com. Support hours are Monday-Friday 9 AM - 12 AM, Saturdays & Sundays 12 PM - 6 PM. All times Eastern.
You can also find more support articles on our Instructor Support database.
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