ARRS
From TeacherWiki
Contents |
Explaining Skill Building Sets and ARRS
Andrew explains how he uses skill builders to give student just the right amount of practice and how the ARRS system makes sure students don't forget concepts.
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What is ARRS?
The Automatic Reassessment and Relearning System is an extension of our Skill Building (the old "Mastery Learning") Problem sets. With the Skill Building Problem Sets students are presented with a problem set that has over 50 problems in it; students work until they reach some level of proficiency set by the teacher. This is a great thing but has the student really "mastered" a problem if they can get a few correct in a given day? A more robust measure of learning would require them to retain that knowledge. So with support from the National Mathematics Center we built a system to Automatically Reassess students a week later, a month later, and then finally two months after that. If students fail the re-assessment, they will be given an opportunity to relearn the topic.
To find skill building sets go here.
Here is a link the the teacher report you will get if you use skill building sets.
Research Results
Here is a study showing the ARRS system leads to better learning for children.
- Heffernan, N., Heffernan, C., Dietz, K., Soffer, D., Pellegrino, J. W., Goldman, S. R. & Dailey, M. (2012). Improving Mathematical Learning Outcomes Through Automatic Reassessment and Relearning. AERA 2012 pdf
How to get started
ARRS Is a Setting so you have to turn it on.
- Go to your ASSESS page and Select a class you want to use for ARRS.
- You will load this class with Skill Building Sets (the red kind). If you assign problem sets that are not Skill Building (black) they will be ignored by ARRS.
- Many teachers have a separate class for ARRS.
- click on "Toggle Settings" and at the bottom of the list you can enable ARRS.
- You can also reset the settings. This allows you to make the reassessment tests show up more or less often. Most teachers leave the defaults at first.
- Now ARRS is set for that class and once students "Master" problem sets they will then be automatically re-assessed each week (that is the given setting, you can change it).
- You may want to go into Tutor and enroll yourself, do the problems and see what the report looks like.
Edit the Skill Building Problem Sets
We have built and are building many Skill Building problem sets. If you want to adjust the settings go here to learn how:
All of the Skill Building problem sets in ASSISTments Certified Problem sets are set at 3 to master and 10 a day with no test out. But there are many reasons why you may want to change those settings. It depends on your students needs.
The ARRS Reports
Skill Building Set
- First you will want to monitor the report from the original Skill Building Set. To do this click on Item Report next to those individual Assignments.
Monitoring with the ARRS reports
- Then you will want to monitor the students Reassessments and Relearning assignments.
To do this Click on "Arrs Reports" This is found while viewing the many of the reports, such as the item or mastery report.
Summary ARRS Report
When you click on ARRS Report you get this report. This Main ARRS report is used to monitor students work. It is not anonomized since this is only about effort. If a students has check marks after their name, they did their work on time, if not they did not do it on time. The links on this report take you to other reports that help you follow your students' progress.
This report use to require that all assignments it looked at have a due date, but we have since removed this restriction. We base the report on the assignments that have been released to the students. If no due date is set, we will not make the first mastering of that problem set count as a late assignment. We will however, mark a relearning assignment as late if enough days have passed, even if the original assignment does not have a due date. This is to be consistent to what the student sees.
You will notice this report has four columns of numbers after the students names. We will now go over what these mean.
Number of assignments not yet completed
This is how many assignments the student could log into their account and complete. These may include mastering of the original assignments, or having to relearning assignments. Unfortunately, we ignore if the student cannot complete this assignment because they have surpassed the daily mastery limit. Nevertheless it provides a great overall summary.
Late assignments
This is the subset of the number of outstanding assignments not yet completed which are past thier due date. A due date is set for all relearning assignments according to your ARRS settings. A due date can also be set for all problem sets.
Number of original assignments mastered
This is how many of the assignments that are Mastery Learning Problem Sets released to the class, that a given student has mastered. In other words, if you assign 10 mastery problem sets, and a student completes 8 of them, and is already onto reassessing and relearning with 4 of those 8, this column will show 8.
Number completed
When a student has completed all their reassessing (sees all boxes with checks on the student assignment page) then this column relects it. This is how many problem sets the student is completely finished with.
The check marks
As you can see in all of the other boxes, there is a combination of checks, X's, and question marks, or an N\A. We will now go over these.
N\A This means the student did not have a reassessment test to take. A student will still have a test pop up, but if they were to click on it there would be nothing to do. This is a sign that either a student has not mastering the original assignments, or on the positive side, being in the later part of their reassessment phase, which is often accompanied by longer time periods between reassessments.
This means the student took their reassessment test and is all caught up in the relearning. They either answered each question correctly or they went back and finished their relearning.
The student took their reassessment test, answered at least one question incorrectly and they have not relearned that skill. More importantly, the question mark means their relearning is not yet due. When enough days go by, it will switch to an X.
The student took their test, got at least one problem incorrect, and were late on completing their relearning. A student may have finished their relearning from this reassessment test, but if they did they did it late. This will remain an 'X' regardless of what they do.
The student did not take their reassessment test when they should have. There was going to be problems on their test to take.
Cumulative Problem Report
This report shows All of the skills and the history of reassessments for each student, as well as an average on reassessments for the class. We highlight in green student and skill averages which are high, and highlight in red, averages which are low. These can be used to identify strong\weak students, as well as skills that are hard to remember.
By clicking on a students name, you can navigate to the particular student's ARRS report, which provides detail analysis of their preformance on a given reasessment test.
Student ARRS REPORT
This report shows students complete results for a single reassessment test. It includes a link to the problem which they were given on the test (click on the problem set name), the answer which the student gave and the correct answer. It also shows the status of relearning for the problems which the student got wrong. There is a pull down navigation which allows you to switch between students, as well as a selector which shows which reassessment tests the student took. If it has "took test" next to the date, it means the student clicked on their reassessment test for that day. The test may still be empty if there were no skills that were due for reassessment at that time.
Reasessment Results For One Day
This shows a column for each skill tested that day. Reports N\A, Correct or Wrong for each student. There is an average for the class for each assignment on the particular reasessment test.
Student's Experience
This is a screen shot of what a student sees the day before the retention test.
This page was created by Cristina Heffernan, 2010
