Differentiated Quizzes/Student Choice

kyle_rarick
Community Novice

I am a Digital Coach for my school and am helping other teachers to incorporate Canvas into their instructional practices. Recently I have had the same question/concept come up for discussion and I want to know if there is a more effective way to do it. So I will pose the questions here and see what you think. I have multiple math teachers who want to do two things.

1. Create a quiz that allows students to be able to miss up to 4 questions and not be penalized for it with the grade. So basically, if the student gets anything higher than a 6/10, they'd receive 10 points.

My solution: I told the teacher the best way I could think of not penalizing the students for missing difficult questions was to give the difficult questions a lesser point value. Therefore, if it were an easy question, it could be worth 2 points. If it were a difficult question, it could be worth .25 points. That way, their students would not be destroyed if they weren't successful on the difficult questions.

2. Create a quiz that allows students to pick and choose which questions to answer. For example, a teacher wanted to create a quiz that had multiple questions worth different amounts of points. Her goal for the students was that they needed to get 10 total points. So, if they wanted to do 10 questions for 1 point each, or 5 questions worth 2 points each, or 2 questions worth 5 points, or 1 question that was worth 10 points, that they had the ability to choose from all the questions in the quiz.

My Solution: I told the teacher that she could basically create a variety of quizzes, one quiz with 10 questions worth 1 point each. One quiz with 5 questions worth 2 points each, and so on. Then, she could give the students the opportunity to choose from those different quizzes.

Again, I know these might not be the best solutions, but I wanted to reach out to see if anybody has had a similar situation and had a method that worked really well for you.

Thanks!