These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Using VBA to Create an Adaptive Review for Chemistry Students

I am currently working part-time as a Chemistry teacher for a high school in Salt Lake City, and as part of this job, I have noticed two challenges I faced as a teacher: 1. It is difficult to match the material students are studying to their capabilities 2. Being grossly outnumbered by students, it is hard as a teacher to provide quick feedback for students so that they can correct errors in understanding early on. 


To solve those challenges I have created a review tool which quizzes students on different types of Chemistry problems; when students give their answers to these questions, they immediately see whether they got the problem right or wrong, and then they are randomly assigned another problem to work on.  As they continue answering problems, the program begins weighting the problems in such a way that the problems the student struggles with are asked more frequently than the ones the student has already mastered.  After the student finishes her study session, her results are automatically posted to a google doc so that the teacher can now tell which areas his students are struggling in so that he can better use time set aside in class to review in the most efficient manner possible.

workboook: http://files.gove.net/shares/files/14w/mikedoug/Review.xlsm
write up: http://files.gove.net/shares/files/14w/mikedoug/Writeupforreals.pdf

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