BEACON Q: Encouraging Regular Self-Testing via a Personalized and Gamified Quiz App

Studies have shown that students who study intensively before their exams tend to quickly forget the information they may have retained, while also feeling more stressed and anxious. In contrast, active learners who regularly revise and test themselves have been shown to better improve their long-term retention, as well as feel more confident for assessments. This work presents an accessible form of self-testing via a new mobile quiz app, namely BEACON Q, with various features to encourage students to break away from their bulk studying habits and follow instead an approach that relies on the so-called testing effect to induce long-term retention.

To tailor the self-testing experience to the needs of the student, the app integrates a dynamic difficulty system to adjust the quizzes to each user's skill level, while also supporting interchangeable formats for each question type to alter their difficulty more significantly. Learning material in the form of immediate answer feedback and documents describing the lecture topics are made directly accessible from within the app. Spaced repetition is applied to enable automatic review suggestions and a form of recall analysis for the students to check their exam readiness. Furthermore, a bespoke block-based coding framework, called DartBlock, is developed to support programming-based quiz activities, with a mobile-first interface and interaction design. Difficulty tuning and automatic program evaluation also constitute integral parts of the framework. Finally, a unique gamification approach based on mythological Greek figures is used to personalize the testing experience and foster regular usage of the app.

We report on studies we have conducted using the proposed framework with multiple university level classes, which amounted to a 3-year long collection of performance data and survey answers. The results point to a high user satisfaction rate for the platform as a testing and studying solution, though it did not lead to a significant change in learning habits, with students continuing to study intensively shortly before their exams. As an alternative approach, an exam structure based on cumulative assessment is proposed as a potential way to mitigate bulk studying and motivate more regular testing.