A case study of a probability and statistics course: Improving students' performance with formative assessment

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of a regular course in Mathematics, offered every academic term to about 1,500 STEM students of the Instituto Superior Técnico of Lisbon. The main concerns for this course are the low approval and high dropout rates. A new approach, called Online Electronic Quizzes with Random Parameters, based on formative assessment was introduced to run alongside the already adopted summative assessment. The ultimate goal of our work was to map and understand students' weaknesses and then invite professors and staff to discuss and suggest solutions to support students' learning. Preliminary results show that the proposed approach contributed to increase students' performance and approval rates in approximately 11% of the cases. Show more