Abstract:

Sometimes students feel anxious about taking the quiz especially if they are not very well trained or do not have enough grip on the material taught. This anxiety results in distraction, blank out and may be a mental block to answer questions that they already studies hard and know the answer of. This situation leads to a distorted assessment of their attainment of the quiz's goals. This anxiety may be reduced if the stacks are not too high for the quiz and the quiz’s result could be amended through getting more than one chance to take this quiz.

The research questions are: would it be better to give students more than one chance in the quiz. How many chances would be optimum? Should we average all tries or use reduced grade for each try? This research’s objective is to present an assessment’s experiment where the results could shed light on answers of these questions in a class that employs Active Leaning paradigm.

The research’s study lasted for two semesters. Three groups were selected to carry through this research each is 25 students strong. All groups are at the sophomore level in an engineering school taking an introductory course to engineering design that uses 10 quizzes for formative assessment. Each quiz has a second chance if not passed, but with a grade reduction factor in effect.

The first group was given only one chance per each question in all quizzes. The second group was given two chances per question and the third was given three chances per each question.

The results of the study point out to an increase in attainment for the group who was given two chances per question in each quiz.

Keywords:

Active Learning, quiz results, second chances, quiz anxiety, assessment accuracy.