How Does the PRA Algorithm Choose Resources for Students? – DnA & ISE

When assigning Personalized Review Assignments, or PRAs to students, the number of activities assigned creates a completion goal for students on how many assignments they need to complete.

How Does That Work Exactly?

The easiest way to understand how PRA resource delivery works is with a simple example. Suppose you have an assessment that covers Learning Standards A, B, and C, with 4 questions for each standard. You've set up a PRA with a resource associated with each standard, as well as a Challenge Activity. In this situation, the default behavior will be that students will be required to complete between 1 and 3 resources. Let's consider four hypothetical students, and see which resources each student will be required to complete:

John gets 50% of the Standard A questions correct, 75% of the Standard B questions correct, and 25% of the Standard C questions correct. John will be required to view 3 resources: first the one for Standard C, then the one for A, then the one for B.
Kristi gets 100% on Standard A, 25% on Standard B, and 50% on Standard C. Kristi will be required to view 2 resources: first the one for B, then the one for C. She is not required to view the resource for Standard A because she got 100% on the questions for that standard.
Lawrence gets 75% on Standard A, 100% on Standard B, and 100% on Standard C. Lawrence will be required to view 1 resource: the one for Standard A, where he did not answer all the questions correctly.
Maria gets 100% on the entire assessment (100% on all three standards). Maria will be required to view 1 resource: the Challenge Activity, since her performance indicates that she has mastered all 3 standards.

You can alter the way resources are chosen, as well as how many resources each student will need to complete, by clicking the Show Advanced Options checkbox.

Want More Scenarios?

Suppose you clicked to Show Advanced Options and specified that both the Maximum required resources per student and Minimum required resources per student should be 2. In this case:

John would be required to view the resources for Standards C and A (the two standards he did most poorly on)
Kristi would be required to view the resources for Standards B and C (the two standards she did most poorly on)
Lawrence would be required to view the resource for Standard A (the standard he did most poorly on), then the Challenge Activity
Maria would be required to view the Challenge Activity and one other resource, which would be randomly chosen from the three standards.

Now, let's consider one more change to the setup:

Suppose you specified an additional Challenge Activity, and specified that all students were required to complete a maximum of 3 and a minimum of 2 resources. Here is how that would look:

John would be required to view the resources for Standards C, A, and B.
Kristi would be required to view the resources for Standards B and C.
Lawrence would be required to view the resource for Standard A, then one of the two Challenge Activities (chosen by the system at random).
Maria would be required to view both Challenge Activities.

Note that in all of these cases, all students are free to view as many resources as they wish; what changes with the settings is the number of resources each student is required to view in order to be counted as having completed the Personalized Review Assignment as a whole.

Next Steps

See what students see when they complete an assessment by visiting Enable Student Preview of Personalized Review Assignments.

Ready to review PRA results? Check out how PRA Class Activity and Student Results!