Presented by
- Jess Kahlow, PhD, Customer Success Manager, Cidi Labs / Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Arlington
- Hugh Kellam, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Arlington
- Carlos Hernandez, Graduate Student, University of Texas at Arlington
- Serena De Leon, Graduate Student, University of Texas at Arlington
Session Description
Learning frameworks emphasize the importance of giving students low-stakes opportunities to practice, reflect, and make mistakes without the immediate consequences of a grade. But when instructors add ungraded interactive activities (like sorting, ordering, matching, fill-in-the-blank, or multiple-choice questions) as formative assessments to Canvas courses, do students actually complete them? And, does their participation improve their overall grade?
We’ll present initial findings from a study analyzing aggregated course-level data from K-12 and higher education institutions using interactive activities (created with DesignPLUS from Cidi Labs). We’ll move beyond pedagogical theory to share empirical evidence on how student interaction metrics (such as total attempts, scores, and time spent) correlate with average course performance. Finally, we’ll show how easy it is to build these interactives and how you can map them to course and module outcomes.
What this is really about
If you've ever added a "just for practice" quiz or flashcard set to a course and wondered whether anyone was actually using it, this is the session where we try to answer that with real numbers instead of a shrug or an "I sure hope so." We're looking at what actually happens when instructors add ungraded, formative interactive exercises to their Canvas courses. Using aggregated data from DesignPLUS Interactive Exercises across K-12 and higher education courses, this session shares early findings on whether students complete these low-stakes activities, how participation relates to course grades, and what that means for how we design and place interactives going forward.
Spoilers!
Do students click on interactive activities? So far, yes. We'll walk through our early data on how often students engage with ungraded DesignPLUS interactives. This also raised some questions about best practices surrounding the inclusion of interactive exercises… so we created this white paper on research-backed recommendations for how to build and place interactive exercises.
Do interactive activities help learning "click" for students? So far, also yes! So far, engagement with interactives tracks with course grades. Our early numbers say participation is the strongest lever we've found so far; courses with higher participation rates in these ungraded activities also tended to have higher average grades. It's preliminary (we're working with limited data right now) but it is still reassuring. If you're using DesignPLUS Interactive Exercises, please help us not have limited data by sharing your interactive and course data in a quick survey!
This one's for you if…
- You're an instructional designer or faculty developer who keeps getting asked, "But will students actually do this if it's not graded?"
- You use Canvas and you're curious about low-stakes, formative assessment design.
- You're a DesignPLUS user (or DesignPLUS-curious) who wants to see what the Interactive Data tool can actually tell you.
Resources
See you in Louisville!
