Each student receives a grade at the end of every lesson that shows their current mastery of this concept. As students receive questions of varying difficulty, and also because they may have demonstrated these skill previously or in other questions, the grade received adjusts to take the student's total performance into account. This has proven to be a much more accurate measure of the student's level of mastery.
When evaluating a student's score on a concept, the following factors are taken into account:
- Score achieved on these questions
- Previous work
- Question difficulty
While the first factor is obvious, the other two need to be explained more clearly.
Previous work
Before the student starts this lesson, we often already know a lot about them. In some cases, the student may have previously attempted this concept; if that was recently, we take that work into account also. They may also have worked on related concepts in the curriculum that also demonstrated their level of knowledge of this concept.
Question difficulty
BuildUp adjusts the difficult level to suit each student. So this has to be taken into account in the score, as you would expect. In general, getting more difficult questions correct has a stronger positive impact on the score than getting easier questions correct; while getting easier questions wrong has a stronger negative impact on the score than getting more difficult question wrong.
In combination, this approach provides a much more accurate measure of the learner's mastery of a concept than a simple percentage-correct. This enables the other adjustments and recommendations in BuildUp to be more accurate and useful to students, and informative to teaches.