Scratch tickets are not just for the lottery, they could play a part in the future of university testing.
University of Western Ontario Physics professor Jeff Hutter is using ‘scratch and win’ style cards to test first-year students on course material. The strategy is part of a study funded by the Teaching Support Centre.
University of Western Ontario Physics professor Jeff Hutter is experimenting with so-called ‘scratch and win’ cards to test students in his Physics 1024 course as part of an ongoing educational research study funded by a Western Teaching Support Centre grant.
Hutter described how this new technique is revealing information about how students write multiple-choice tests during a presentation last week on “Educational research and innovation in the Physics & Astronomy Department.”
For each tutorial quiz and two mid-term exams, students were given a scratch ticket – not your generic lottery brand, but an Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique card (IF-AT). In order to answer the multiple choice questions, students scratch the appropriate letter box (A, B, C, D, or E) and if they get the answer right, a star will be revealed.
If the box is empty, the answer is wrong and the student can take a gamble by scratching other squares for a second and third chance at getting it right.
Unlike the traditional Scantron sheets commonly used for multiple-choice exams, for which only one answer can be selected, the IF-AT cards are marked by hand and students can earn partial marks for up to three attempts at answering the same question.
Hutter says students put high demands on professors for quick turnaround on assignments and tests. Using the IF-AT card for testing, “students get immediate feedback, then they know right away if they got it right.
“They know their score before they leave the room,” he says.
Although he admits the scratch ticket-style testing seems like a gimmick to get the students’ attention, Hutter says it is not the only reason they like it. Aside from knowing whether they answered the question properly, students appreciate having an extra try at answering the question.
“Students like it because they can salvage part of their grade, which you can’t do with Scantron,” he says.
IF-AT also has built-in safeguards to prevent cheating, he adds. The black stars, which are used to indicate the correct answer, are not all placed in the center of the square so students are not able to scratch the centre of all the boxes to reveal the star.
Although the scratch tickets are user-friendly, Hutter says it takes a lot of preparation to use them for a test or exam.
Once the exam answer key has been set, it cannot be changed at the last minute because the cards are preset. “You have to put in a lot of time making sure you get it right,” says Hutter.
There is also a price for innovation – the scratch cards cost $500 for a set of 2,000.
Hutter and his colleagues, Carol Jones, Assistant Dean, Diversity and Outreach for the Faculty of Science, and Margaret Campbell-Brown, assistant professor in Physics, are collecting data from Hutter’s class to investigate their usefulness in helping students learn and improve grades.
“At this point with very preliminary data … it’s not obvious it really helps. On the other hand, the jury is still out.”
In the short term, he did notice students seemed to do better on questions that had been asked in quizzes during tutorials held closer to the exam period and repeated on the mid-term.
“Maybe it is a question of how long they retain the knowledge, for some students there seems to be a benefit,” he says. “If they like it and it doesn’t help them, does it still make it a good thing? Well, it doesn’t make it a bad thing.”
Hutter plans to continue the study for a summer intersession Physics course.
Part of the reason for experimenting with new testing strategies is that Physics is a required course for first-year biology and medical sciences students; however it tends to be an unpopular choice among non-Physics majors, he says.
“I think part of it is physicists in general are interested in experimenting and are interested in interpreting data to see if it is really working or not … it’s just part of the culture,” he says, adding the overall goal is to improve students’ understanding of the material.
“Now we are looking for new ways to make it more useful for them, but also more palatable for them.”
By scratching the appropriate box, students reveal a star to indicate a correct answer. The cards provide immediate feedback on a test score.