Setting Required Tutoring:

Mediamatrix is built on a pedagogical philosophy which allows students multiple attempts to show that they have "mastered" the material on any given chapter. Thus we HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you allow as many testings of a chapter as a student wishes, while retaining only the "highest" score (in fact this is the default way MediaMatrix is designed to work--only special arrangements for singular offerings of supervised testing like those traditionally used in classrooms avoid this feature). This encourages motivated but struggling students to restudy and retake alternative tests until they satisfy themselves with their performance or run out of time by virtue of passing deadlines.

However, many poor students merely practice poor study habits over and over in these cases. If your teaching philosophy concides with ours, you may wish to let a student determine his/her "baseline" of knowledge and study ability on any given chapter by taking only one or two certification tests "diagnostically." If they pass your criteria of "mastery" then they don't have to take it again (although they might wish to in order to improve their score). But if they don't pass your criteria, in however many diagnostic attempts you wish to allow, then you may wish to require tutoring by those students who need tutorial help in acquiring not only mastery of a chapter's content, but who also need help in building their study skills (this "meta-learning" skill development is a primary goal for which MediaMatrix's Adaptive Tutoring was originally designed). Thus MediaMatrix allows instructors to specify what their minimal criteria are. To work with these parameters, you need to navigate to the "Required Tutoring" screen by selecting that option from the "Group Parameters" menu:

 

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This is a relatively simple and straight-forward screen that presents only one selection option and two parametric options. The selection option is whether to turn "Required Tutoring" on or off:

 

click on picture to go to a full-screen version   As the above graphic illustrates, when Required Tutoring is first set to "On" you will receive a feedback screen telling you the results of your selection. After setting Required Tutoring to "On" you should first determine how many certification attempts below criteria you will allow before a student is "locked-in" for Required Tutoring. You will also want to set what the required "Passing" criteria will be for a student not to experience required tutoring. To change either of these values, merely select the existing value and over-type it with your desired value:  

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When tutoring "lock-in" occurs, the student is informed on screen that any and all topics within the current chapter being certified that has had a question missed on prior Certification Tests will have studyiing in Tutor Mode required before another Certification Test becomes available to the student. Topics that have had successful assessment are not in the required list until such time that some question from that topic is missed in a future test. In the Required Tutoring condition, the student sees a "Required Tutoring" menu in the left margin of all topics. This menu marks all such required topics as a prompt that it needs studying. This menu also presents a selectable navigation menu to each topic requiring tutoring. As a topic is successfully tutored, that topic drops from the required list. When the list is fully satisfied, Certification Testing for the involved chapter again becomes available and the "number of tests and passing criteria" become active for a new cycle.

As with all interactions in the Instructor's Control Application, your selection and all subsequent parametric changes do not take effect until they are actually registered with the server (the equivalent of "Saving" a file in normal computer use) via the "Accept as Group Settings" button as illustrated below:

 

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Next Topic.....(Setting Bonus Options)