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Educational ResearchWeb 2.0 Tool

Use This Puzzle Maker Tool for Retrieval Practice

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Ready to dig into game-based learning? While you’re waiting for a new TCEA Game-Based Learning course, I have a treat for you. This a tool that many educators are relying on in the midst of hybrid teaching and learning. It’s like other quiz show type programs.

Introducing Vimboard

A modern puzzle-making tool, Vimboard (@vimboard1) creates an interactive learning experience by combining puzzle making with a multiple choice question set. As students respond with correct answers, an image appears. Vimboard is free and you can use any of its pre-existing puzzles and content to get started. Here’s one example:

This example game focuses on students responding to physical/chemical change questions. As they respond, they get to see the image shown above. You will explore this in more detail in a moment. Before you do that, let’s revisit the importance of retrieval practice, also known as practice testing.

A Low-Stress Retrieval Practice Activity

Contrary to popular belief, multiple choice questions can enhance learning. Consider the research on their use:

  • Multiple-choice retrieval can be just as effective, or more effective, than short answer retrieval (McDermott et al., 2014).
  • Providing students with feedback decreases or eliminates students’ learning of misinformation (Butler & Roediger, 2008).
  • While they’re are quick to administer and grade, you should take some time to create multiple-choice questions and alternatives carefully for a larger retrieval benefit (Little et al., 2012).
  • Multiple-choice questions enhance learning for related information that wasn’t even on the quiz (Bjork et al., 2014) (source: Retrieval Practice).

Vimboard offers a simple way to quiz students on any topic. Successful answers yield access to a picture. Vimboard will also keep track of how well your students, did, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Vimboard offers an easy-to-use, simple quiz tool. This can be useful for retrieval practice or practice testing, both low-risk assessments that assist students. Some recommendations for using Vimboard for practice testing include:

  • Use quizzes often. This provides students with feedback on whether they are right or wrong in their grasp of concepts and vocabulary. These strategies can lead to deeper understanding, not only memorization of facts.
  • Keep it low stakes. Avoid grading the use of Vimboard. The goal is to spread out assessments over time, as you can see in the figure below.
  • Revisit old content. Don’t be afraid to make quiz questions about content you have already covered. In this way, students are able to better learn and retain content they have been introduced to before.

As you can see in the image below, which represents practice testing (a.k.a. retrieval practice), spreading out short assessments over time can yield great results for long-term retention.

Explore Vimboard Educational Puzzles

The heart of Vimboard is its interactive search for existing educational puzzles. From K-12 through a wide variety of subjects (shown below), you can find many pre-created puzzles to use.

When you view an existing puzzle, you see both the puzzle image and questions. The answer choices to each question appear below each. For example, the questions and answers for the chemical/physical change puzzle are:

You can add any educational puzzle you find to your collection. This makes it possible for you to edit the collection. Or, if you prefer, you can use the share icon to make it available to others online, such as your students or colleagues.

Once shared, students enter their names and work through the questions. A nice feature is that the questions are read aloud to students if they tap on the sound icon beneath the question. You can see a walkthrough of the process below.

Puzzle Game Creation

Want to take a stab at creating your own game? This is a three step process:

  • Introduction: In this step, you provide a title for the game, write a description, and select subject and grade level.
  • Image: In this next area, you provide a picture and decide on the number of tiles that will cover the picture. As students respond to questions correctly, they will remove the tiles that cover the image. Ten tiles means you can have ten questions. You are not required to match one for one (question:tiles). You could provide less questions and Vimboard will remove a portion of the tiles.
  • Quiz: This is where you enter the actual questions and responses. These are in multiple choice format.

How do you imagine you will use Vimboard to support retrieval practice in your classroom?

Feature Image Source

Screenshot by author.

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Good TeachingWeb 2.0 Tool

Create Interactive Lessons with Deck•Toys

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Teaching anything online can be a challenge. How to make static resources and texts become interactive, able to be manipulated, and provide hands-on learning is at the heart of the problem. We learn because we interact with life around us. We engage when we touch and partake of the movable feast. How do you do that when so much of what we must learn is static? That’s where tools like Deck•Toys come in.

Before we jump into  Deck•Toys, let’s take a moment to revisit the value of interactivity in learning.

Deck•Toys

Valuing Interactivity

How do we know that interactive learning has value? Consider John Hattie’s assessment of classroom practices:

“There is no fixed recipe for ensuring that teaching has the maximum possible effect on student learning, and no set of principles apply to all learning for all students. But there are practices that we know are effective and many practices that we know are not.”

Hattie concludes that if teachers are using practices that have a less than 0.40 effect, then it “may mean that teachers need to modify or dramatically change their theories of action.” (Source)

New technologies lack the wealth of a long history of research into their effectiveness. For that reason, we must ask what is the cost of innovation? Change that does not speed up student growth is a time waster. Time is one of our most precious resources as teachers and learners.

Deck•Toys

When we seek to value interactive learning lessons, we must ask the question:

Do interactive lessons add value to the learning experience? That is, do they accelerate student growth?

Without direct research on a technology that creates interactivity, we can’t say. What we can do is place strategies that work in new technologies. Think of it as putting jewels into a crown. The jewels are the proven strategies; the crown is the technology. By doing so, we get both innovative value and improved functionality.

For Deck•Toys, one strategy I see that would work well is spaced vs massed practice (effect size of 0.65). Here’s what Visible Learning Meta X database has to say about it:

Students are better able to commit information to memory. This happens when they study that information in spaced (or distributed) intervals. Studying “massed” interval(s) does not work as well as spaced.

You can see the effect of research on simple topics like multiplication and spelling:

To test the hypothesis that expanded practice is superior to massed practice in a classroom situation, a test series with expanded intervals to teach multiplication facts and spelling lists to 44 Grade 3 students, formed into massed and expanded groups based on their spelling and mathematical abilities, was conducted.

Results show that, for multiplication facts, retention in the expanded series condition was almost twice that in the massed series condition; for spelling lists, a significant difference in the same direction was also obtained. These differences were obtained regardless of the level of ability of the Ss.

It is suggested that an expanded test series not only engenders effective retention but also maintains a feeling of success throughout (Source).

Studying information over shorter sessions in a longer period of time yields benefits. How can we structure student learning with a variety of interactive, distributed learning? The answer might be Deck•Toys.

Introducing Deck•Toys

Deck•Toys, which has an active Facebook group, makes it easy to space out learning. What’s more, the availability of structuring tools allows you use existing content. Notice the learning path of this mathematics activity:

Deck•Toys

You can see a variety of activities that can cover the same content, making it more interactive. Students begin with the Lesson and then proceed down a learning path that presents activities such as:

  • Sort Me
  • Match
  • Choose Your Path
  • Lines
  • Word Search
  • Choices
  • Crossword
  • Maze

As an example, under the Sort Me activity, students encounter an activity that requires them to sort 2D and 3D shapes into appropriate boxes. They do this through click-and-drag.

Deck•Toys

After completing the activities, they end up at the Finish line and receive quick feedback on their results. If students drag a 3D shape into a 2D box, Deck•Toys moves it to the correct location. The results screen shows how many they got right or wrong.

Deck•Toys

Deck•Toys works with Google Classroom. Students can login with their Google account or as a guest. It supports tracking of student progress as well.

Deck•Toys

You can see student names in blue next to each activity.

Types of Activities

Wondering what types of activities Deck•Toys enjoys? It has two major sets. The first is Slide Apps. Use it to get real-time responses from students. You can even put your own worksheets into it.

The second type of activity is Study Set Apps.

Again, one of the key ideas is that Deck•Toys makes it easy to take existing information and make it interactive. Now,  Deck•Toys also includes classroom tools, such as the ones shown below. I’ve adapted explanations from the website with a few edits.

  • Report. The Report app is where you can view and grade all student responses in a single view.
  • Lock Features. This includes two types of locks. Activity Lock provides an obstacle or extra challenge for the student to complete. They must do this before moving on to the next activity. The second type of lock is Lock in Slide. The Lock app in Slide App gets student’s answer to more questions in different modes.
  • Treasure Key Lock. Treasure Key lock requires students to collect a Treasure Key with a matching Key ID to unlock the lock. Watch the video tutorial.
  • Team. This allows you to assign students to up to four different colored teams. The goal is to turn your classroom into a positive competitive environment.

Feeling overwhelmed by everything  Deck•Toys can do? Be sure to explore their Knowledge Base and Frequently Asked Questions.

Deck•Toys Examples

There are a lot of examples of how you can use Deck•Toys across different. What are some of the ways you imagine yourself designing interactive learning experiences with your students?

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Content AreasGood TeachingWriting

Note-Taking and Outlining: Five Digital Helpers

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Wish you had an easy way to annotate websites or research articles and then share them with others? Do you need to guide high school and/or college students in the area of note-taking? If so, you’ve come to the right place. In this blog entry, I’ll feature a few digital tools that should come in handy for this purpose. At the end, I will share my recommendations.

Before we do that, let’s revisit the importance of note-taking and annotating content.

A Note-Taking Strategy That Works

Many educators are now familiar with the research that the act of handwriting your notes gets you results. Consider this quote from NPR’s interview with research study authors Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Pam A. Mueller. The authors sought to test how handwritten notes affect learning compared to notes taken using a computer or digital device.

“The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies had to be more selective. You can’t write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them.”

The researchers noted the two types of note-taking and defined them in this way:

  • Generative: Summarizing, paraphrasing, concept-mapping characterize this approach.
  • Nongenerative: Verbatim copying describes this approach.

As you might imagine, the generative approach has a greater impact on learning. According to another study, researchers found that handwritten notes also engage your senses. As a result, the act of note-taking makes your brain more active. Learning improves because of your brain’s activity (Source).

Hattie’s Mindset

As you might imagine, John Hattie’s meta-analysis of note-taking research reveals something, too. That is, that note-taking has an effect size of .51, which accelerates student growth in one year. Remember that standard growth has an effect size of .40, so anything greater than .40 is beneficial.

While handwritten notes do much, it is the acts they force us to engage in that actually yield results. Those acts take place during generative note-taking and include:

As you can see, each of these activities has the potential to speed up student growth in one year. Two other strategies are also useful here. The first is outlining and summarizing (effect size of .66). Defined below, this .66 effect size strategy can be quite effective (edited for blog):

Identifying the main ideas and rendering them in one’s own words. The core skill is being able to distinguish between  main ideas and supporting ideas. Or, main ideas and examples

The second is spaced vs mass practice (effect size of .65) . Notes, outlines, and summaries allows us to remember information over time. We can refer to this strategy:

Students are better able to commit information to memory. This happens when they study that information in spaced (or distributed) intervals. Studying “massed” interval(s) does not work as well as spaced.

Studying information over shorter sessions in a longer period of time yields benefits. Given the value of notes, outlines, and summaries, we can revisit content again and again. Providing this information up front to students would help them.

Change That Adds Value

A change that adds value is one definition for “innovation.” In this case, the technology tools shown below are innovations. They not only ease post note-taking, but address the other strategies that work.

Technology enhances outlining and summarizing, making it easy to outline and annotate. The ability to revisit content is helpful here, as is how we interact with that content together.

Let’s explore some digital tools that can provide better support to students’ efforts with strategies that work.

Five Digital Tools

You may be familiar with some of these tools already or be exploring them for the first time. My goal in sharing them is that you do so with the strategies that work in mind. Share these with your students. I address age appropriateness in the descriptions.

outlining

Tool #1: Diigo

Diigo.com is a social bookmarking tool. While the social aspect of learning is important, Diigo does more. It lets you create digital outlines, bookmarks, and highlight websites. You can get a Chrome/Firefox extension, too.

annotating

Diigo makes it easy to annotate and add comments to web pages. You can share your annotations/comments with others and can also do the following:

  • Highlight critical features of text (essential text or text to NOT read)
  • Ask students to define words, terms, or concepts in their own words/language
  • Provide definitions of difficult/new terms
  • Mark up online text with comments, observations, and corrections
  • Add bookmarks for the students to interact with
  • Use the highlighting and sticky notes like a word processor’s Track Changes feature

I first started using Diigo in 2008. There’s a lot to like in Diigo, even if “social bookmarking” has fallen by the wayside. You can see that tools that work, like outlining and summarizing, endure.

Tool #2: Hypothes.is

“Visible, active, and social.” That’s how the no-cost Hypothes.is tool describes itself. Hypothes.is makes it possible for students to “write in the margins” and annotate online text. Even more important, it makes that work social if needed.

Like Diigo, it offers both private and public commenting/annotation options and includes a variety of online resources/videos for those who want to get started:

Are you a Canvas LMS user? How about moodle, Sakai, Schoology, or Blackboard? Or D2L’s Brightspace? If so, you may be happy to learn that Hypothes.is integrates with all of those. You need only add the app to your learning management system (LMS) of choice. There are also resource guides for students and teachers.

Tool #3: Mendeley

Aimed at higher education, Mendeley allows you to annotate what you read. Some of its features include:

  • Add your thoughts on documents in your own library, even from mobile devices
  • Share documents with groups of colleagues and annotate them together
  • Import paper and other documents from your device, existing libraries, or websites
  • Automatic capture of author, title ,and publisher information
  • Have all your annotations and library backed up to the cloud

Mendeley offers “cite as you write” plugins. That means that if you use Microsoft Word or LibreOffice, Mendeley has you covered and supports more than 8,000 citation styles. Although a research tool, you are able to engage in shared annotation like Diigo and Hypothes.is. And, unlike Diigo, but like Hypothes.is, it is no cost.

Tool #4: WeavaTools

WeavaTools has a variety of features at varying costs. It offers some basic citation styles, but nothing like Mendeley. With WeavaTools, you can highlight text, make annotations, clip images, and organize your clips. The free version includes some simple export options like Word, Excel, text, and CSV. The premium version has a monthly cost.

Tool #5: Zotero

Zotero offers collection, organization, citation, and research-sharing options. Although a no-cost service, you can choose to upgrade your storage. This allows you to save everything you have on the computer version of Zotero to the cloud. Zotero works on a variety of platforms. It is more of a citation and research sharing tool. This makes it useful to college students. Some might consider it too complex for high school students, unless advanced.

Using the Five Digital Helpers

If you’re looking for tools to assist you in outlining and summarizing, then these may meet your needs. My recommendation is to take a hard look at Diigo.com and Hypothes.is for use in high school classrooms. Mendeley is great for advanced high school and college students.

Updated 02/09/2021: Added an infographic.

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knowt
Good Teaching

Test-Enhanced Learning Made Simple with Knowt

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

The research is clear: rereading a text doesn’t work as well as taking a test over the material. Known as retrieval practice, it involves students studying a passage of text. Then, students take a low-stakes test about it. In this blog entry, we’ll explore a tool that empowers students to make their own tests.

The Testing Effect

“Retrieval practice” involves frequent testing or quizzing. Students take practice tests over a period of time. This pushes them to recall material from memory. In time, this assists students with remembering the material. Research shows that students recall more information from practice testing than rereading.

Practice testing has an effect size of .46. The Visible Learning Meta X database describes it in this way:

Practice testing is a well-established strategy for improving student learning. The aim of practice testing is to support long-term retention. It is also to increase access to retrieving the “to-be-remembered” information. Sometimes called retrieval practice, practice testing, or test-enhanced learning.

Let’s take a look at some research. These results compare studying versus practice testing as a way to increase retention:

  • Studying
    • Need information retained for a short time? Study it.
    • Studying over fewer, longer sessions is less effective than its alternative. The alternative is spacing out the intervals of study over a longer period of time. This is called Spaced vs massed practice and enjoys an effect size of .65.
  • Practice Testing
    • Need long-term retention of information? Use practice testing.
    • Testing has a greater impact than repeated study when done over time.
    • Testing after reading improves students’ ability to answer questions. That includes questions that are “in the text” and “in the head.”
    • Testing done once a day after covering material increased retention
    • Students tested often had increased retention.
    • It doesn’t matter what form the questions take. Students gain the benefit of practice testing regardless of question type. All questions were as effective as the others at enhancing the students’ learning. Question types include:
      • multiple-choice,
      • short-answer, and
      • hybrid questions

You can deepen the impact of practice testing if students receive feedback. Delayed feedback yields better results. That’s no surprise since feedback has an effect size of .64 itself.

What’s convenient about practice testing is teachers or students can create the test. The question is, what’s the best way to do that?

Reviewing High-Effect Size Strategies

Before we jump into the technology side of this, notice that there may be a happy confluence. The confluence is of high-effect size strategies that include the following:

It’s easy to see how these powerful strategies speed growth in a year and a half in a school year. Ok, now that’s out of the way, let’s review some technology tools.

Ways to Create Practice Tests

Although teachers can make a practice test, there’s a benefit to students making it. No doubt, teachers are making tests using various tools that support quizzing.

Some of those tools teachers use include the following:

While students can use these tools, there is another one available.

Student-Created Quizzes

As a high school student, I stumbled upon a technique that I wish someone had told me about earlier. That is, how to read a selection of text then select content that might appear on a test. At the time, I did not create a test. I highlighted, wrote down or summarized critical test information. It was only later that I would reformulate my notes into test questions. This technique was quite effective in history classes, which I made straight “As” in.

Students can now use a free service to turn their notes into practice quizzes. Students can use an online notebook, or import their notes. The imported notes can be in Google Docs, or Word format. Once imported, the student click a button and their notes get turned into a quiz.

Wondering what the digital tool is that can students can use? Asking yourself what tool can they use to get a .47 effect size boost to knowledge retention? Let’s find out.

Meet Knowt: Get to Know Your Notes

Students can take their online notes, click a button, and a quiz appears. Knowt features fill in the blank, multiple choice or short answer questions. Recall that question type doesn’t matter for practice testing. Instead, it’s the repetition on a daily basis to allow for spaced practice (.65 effect size).

For fun, I asked Knowt to import a tough Google Doc. The Google Doc? Matching High-Effect Size Instructional Strategies and Digital Tools. It created a twenty-five question quiz out of the content.

Here’s the first question:

In case you’re wondering, the answer is C. Performance. How did Knowt do this? Knowt describes their process in this way:

First, we take your notes and analyze them using machine learning. On our server, the A.I. determines the best question formats for each sentence. Once it knows the best questions, the algorithm sends it to the web or mobile app for you to take a quiz. It only takes seconds. At the end, you get great quizzes that are custom made from your notes that you can take anywhere you go.

In this 25-question quiz that I created from complicated content, the questions made sense and worked. Here’s what my notes looked like in Knowt:

Fiction vs Non-Fiction

For fun, I decided to drop one of my favorite stories into Knowt. The story? Frank Stockton’s The Lady or the Tiger (online).  One of my favorite teachers, Fr Richard O’Shaughnessy, introduced it to my classmates and I. Like everyone else, we agonized over the ending.

Knowt turned the story into another 25-question quiz. Some of the questions were not reasonable, but if you have to know it cold, Knowt works great.

Watch a Video

Need a quick way to get started? Check out esteemed educator, Richard Bryne, as he shares a demo of GetKnowt.

A teacher’s edition is under development and is due out in April 2020. That’s right around the corner. Sign up for the beta.

Making an AI-powered quiz of study materials has never been easier. Give Knowt a try. Want to share quizzes you create as a teacher? The Knowt Teacher’s Edition makes it possible. It also features a class section, student management, and more. Pilot programs for the teacher’s edition are also available.

Image Source

Feature image. Screenshot by author.

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