Abstract:

The improvement of student’s performance has long been a hot research topic among educators and researchers. The use of students’ assessment to increase students’ academic results and among them the “low stake quiz” (LSQ) with frequent feedback has shown promising results (McDaniel, 2011). Although some theoretical studies and testbeds’ experiments have already been conducted all around the world, “a few techniques have been evaluated in real representative educational contexts” (Dunlosky et al., 2013). In this paper it is presented the preliminary results both internal and external from a pedagogical experiment conducted within a real representative educational context. The study was carried out since 2019/2020 and the presented results will be the ones until 2020/2021 as this is the last school year from where we have already external national exams results. A total of 1707 students were involved during the two school years and a total of 117645 LSQ ware realized.

As the main objective of the project is to evaluate the impact of introducing frequent LSQ with immediate feedback in students’ learning performance, we will show a long series of results both internal and external that lead us to the preliminary conclusion that this approach results in a important students’ performance improvement.

We will start the paper with a brief theoretical introduction to the frequent LSQ with feedback methodology. Then we will also briefly present our web-based platform (internal development) that we use during the experiment. In the following section we will present in detail the exact experiment that was conducted in the school. Then we will present a long compilation of results both internal in different disciplines and assessment topologies and external in national exams. Finally, we will derive some preliminary conclusions about the results and its comparation with previous school years where no LSQ where used. As a future work section we will explain our current work as part of a PhD project at Universidade Católica that will try to build a performance predictor based on past students results and then try to prove (or not) the positive influence of LSQ on students’ performance.

Keywords:

Learning assessment, low stake quiz, academic performance, results.