Extension of the Problem Roulette Library to include student contributed/generated solutions in Stats 250

Grant:

Investigating Student Learning Grant (ISL)

Academic Year:

2014 - 2015 (June 1, 2014 through May 31, 2015)

Funding Requested:

$4,000.00

Project Dates:

Thu, 05/01/2014 - Fri, 05/01/2015

Applicant(s):

bkg

Overview of the Project:

Problem Roulette (PR) is a web based online learning tool at the University of Michigan that provides access to hundreds of problems from past exams for students enrolled in introductory physics, chemistry, biology and statistics courses. Students' feedback in the course evaluations indicates that integrating solutions into the problem roulette database may improve perception of the tool as a study aid. We propose to expand the current PR database by getting the students to create the problem documents while defining a process where the students develop and maintain a subset of the problem library themselves in their discipline. This tournament process is already in use to score homework assignments in physics 405. Students who participated in the online tournament process find it fairly straightforward and have reported as much: "This is convenient because it's online, and we don't need to use any other complicated websites to do this"-anonymous student. Students participate in two ways, first by submitting work to the tournament, and secondly by completing comparison tasks given to them by the application. It is evident that students learn significantly when they realize what mistake they made on an earlier exam problem and then try to redo the answer. By doing this, we hope to engage students actively in their coursework.

Final Report Fields

Project Objectives:

This Problem Roulette Add-On piloted in Stats 250 provides students the opportunity to create teaching solutions for selected questions in Problem Roulette. These solutions are voted on by participants in a tournament style peer review process. Students are able to see all solutions in ranked order for all problems during the review phase. The primary incentive to participate was to gain access to other students solutions, and to learn by teaching others.

Project Achievements:

A JavaScript application was created to facilitate the mechanics of problem presentation and answer selection, as in Problem Roulette. Functionality was added to allow students who answered the problem correct to submit a solution link, where the solution itself was either a google document or a youtube video created by the student. For voting, pairs of solutions were strategically distributed so that the aggregated comparison data would provide an optimal ranking of all the solutions. Thus better solutions were ensured to rise to the top of the rankings.

Continuation:

Given the development of this module, it could now be used in future iterations for exam preparation for courses using Problem Roulette. With ongoing development of the hosting framework, this module could also be deployed in other contexts where the submission, review, and ranking process could help students collaborate.

Dissemination:

This work was presented at the ISL poster fair on Mon, May 4, 2015. A similar presentation about Problem Roulette was made at the 2015 USCOTS (United States Conference on Teaching Statistics) including this work.

Advice to your Colleagues:

Be positive, be flexible, and engage good graduate students.

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