ence. So they have to decide more generally if they
have knowledge in the field or not.
The confidence acquisition uses – similar to UCL’s
approach – a three-level scale with the options ‘Low’,
‘Medium’, and ‘High’. Besides this, there is an option
to choose ‘Give up’ to not answer the question. For the
evaluation, a list of all questions is shown with inform-
ation about correctness of answer and given points
(related to difficulty of the question) and the CBM
mark. The confidence mark is calculated as follows:
two points for high confidence, one point for medium
confidence, and no points for low confidence. The
result is added to the achieved mark for the question
and then set in relation to the maximum mark that can
be achieved.
3 CONFIDENCE RATINGS IN
AMCS
As in all Audience Response Systems, polls represent
the main functionality of AMCS (Kapp et al., 2014).
Each poll consists of a few questions the students can
answer. These polls are accessible for the whole course
or under certain circumstances. For example, when a
specific slide is shown during the lecture, making it a
slide poll (SP). Other types of polls include ‘global’
course polls (CP) that are always accessible as well
as lecture polls (LP) that can only be answered dur-
ing a specific lecture
6
. All types of polls are further
summarised in Table 1.
Polls in AMCS can consist of various types of
questions, including single-choice survey (SC), mul-
tiple-choice survey (MC), single-best choice (SBC),
multiple-best choice (MBC), free text, correct-assign-
ment (CA) and scaled questions (SQ). In the cases
of answering SBC, MBC and CA questions, imme-
diate textual feedback is shown to students for their
given answers. In contrast to other ARS, we implemen-
ted a two-step feedback algorithm. When answering
wrongly on a first attempt, students will get a second at-
tempt to redeem themselves. Regardless of the correct-
ness of the second given answer, students will again
get textual feedback that consists of an explanation on
why exactly the given answers were wrong/correct. In
the case of SBC and MBC questions, the answers are
highlighted in colours corresponding to the correctness
or incorrectness respectively.
We chose these LQs with correct answers for con-
fidence ratings because the performance of the students
can be measured directly with the tool. Thus, the stu-
6
In our nomenclature, a course consists of one or multiple
lectures. Each lecture must be part of a course.
Table 1: Different types of polls in AMCS.
Poll Type Explanation
preparation
poll
(PP)
Active before a lecture. Can be util-
ised to prepare a certain topic or to
inquire the students’ previous know-
ledge.
lecture poll
(LP)
Active during a lecture. Questions
that should not be missed by at-
tendees arriving late.
slide poll
(SP)
Active when specific slide is shown.
Can be used for quizzes during the
lecture, in particular at a predefined
time.
post pro-
cessing
poll (PPP)
Active after a lecture. Usable to
check gained knowledge, for home-
work with automated feedback, etc.
course poll
(CP)
Active during a course, especially
during all of the course’s lectures.
Can be used for questions about
the students’ degree programmes or
their interests.
dents will receive feedback on their performance in
relation to their own confidence ratings after finish-
ing the polls. This can provide them with hints about
the divergence of their self-assessment and their learn-
ing achievements. In subsection 3.3 we describe the
design of different presentations of the results to the
students as well as to the lecturers.
In literature, different options to integrate the con-
fidence ratings into the workflow of answering LQs
are discussed. The approaches differentiate in the time
of asking about the confidence of giving the correct
answer. When only the question text is shown without
the possible answers, it is called Open Confidence Rat-
ing. If all possible choices are shown, students can
describe their certainty to know the right answer. How
we integrated these options of confidence ratings is
described in the following sections.
3.1 Learning Questions with
Certainty Rating
For the certainty rating, students will be asked after
or while answering the question how confident they
are that the chosen answer is right. In this case, they
can see all choices to decide how certain they are. In
related work we have analysed some other systems
using certainty ratings. Most of them use a multi-level
Likert scale with three or five items such as ‘Low’,
‘Medium’, and ‘High’. In a first user study, we tried
out different scales and representations for confidence
ratings. The results are described in section 4. We
decided to use the percentage of certainty to define the
Integrate Confidence Ratings in Audience Response Systems in Order to Help Students to Self-regulate Their Learning Process
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