A part of 2.2 Lightning Talk session

Naomi Levy-strumpf, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Human Biology Program, FAS
Maria Papaconstantinou, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Human Biology Program, FAS

Asking a good question is not a trivial task. It requires deep comprehension and concept integration. To facilitate critical thinking and mastering of foundational concepts in a large Genetics course (~1000 students), we decided to actively engage students in question creation. We used “Quizzical”, an online platform developed by Prof. Dan Riggs. Via this platform, students are tasked with the creation of multiple-choice questions. For each of the suggested answer choices, students are required to provide a comprehensive justification. This includes justification for the correct answer as well as for each of the distractors. An added advantage of the platform is the generation of student-authored quiz banks that can be used for practice and participation marks. Since the questions are created by multiple authors, they included diverse point of views, which as we learned, the students greatly appreciated. To foster metacognition and encourage a shift from perceiving learning as memorization of information, students were encouraged to create application-based questions. Higher grades were granted to questions that creatively integrated multiple concepts or required knowledge application.

The success of incorporating Quizzical as an integral assessment in this course prompted us to further develop the platform to facilitate broad-base use across disciplines. We worked with the U of T IT support team (ITIF grant funding) to add more features and enhance the functionality of the Quizzical platform. We will discuss the learning outcomes achieved by engaging the students in question creation, as well as the added features in the latest Quizzical 5.0 version.