Last week I gave a surprise collaborative quiz to one class, as a test run for possibly using this exercise in my synchronous online courses next semester. The quiz consisted of five multiple-choice questions on basic concepts, deployed in three iterations. First, students took the quiz individually on Canvas, which auto-graded students’ answers but did not reveal which were correct. The individual quiz was worth up to half a percent toward the course grade.
Second, I sent students into team breakout rooms to confer and decide which answers to submit as a group. This version of the quiz was also worth up to half of the course grade. I pasted the quiz into each team’s notes on Google Docs. Because the Canvas quiz tool does not have a “groups” setting, I had already created a Canvas assignment through which each team could submit its answers. Again students did not know which answers were correct — after class I had to read what teams had submitted and manually enter a quiz score for every student who had been present for the breakout room discussions.
Third, after breakout rooms closed, students answered the quiz’s questions yet again in the form of a Zoom poll. After closing the poll and sharing the results, I explained which answers were correct and offered to answer any questions.
Twenty-nine undergraduates are in the course. Three were completely “absent” — they never signed into Zoom during class that day. A fourth student logged out before I announced the group version of the quiz. For the remaining twenty-five students: twelve, or nearly fifty percent, scored higher on the collaborative quiz than on the individual quiz. Great! Three students, all members of the same team, scored lower on the former than on the latter. Ten students’ scores were unchanged.
Finally, the poll, which did not contribute to the course grade: One student left class by disconnecting from Zoom when breakout rooms closed. Of the remaining twenty-four students, nine got the same number of questions correct on the poll and the individual quiz. Ok. Three students did better on the former than they did on the latter. Good. Twelve scored worse on the poll. Terrible! I have no idea why this happened, given the improvement in scores on the collaborative quiz.