I finally got around to petitioning 
sourceforge to provide resources for Duck. The Duck project has had an interesting history. I never would have imagined writing a generic quizzing system and I still have pangs of regret about it. I've already written about why I wrote it, so I won't say more about that here. What I ought to be writing about is analysis of the duck data, of which I have reams. Here are my anecdotal conclusions
- Students like formative assessment. They really like the idea of being able to explore the questions "safely", without risk of penalty.
- Students don't cheat. Most of the students take the quiz and approach it seriously, really trying to select the best answer first. It has been interesting to talk to students and hear them describe the strategies that they take to overcome automated quizzes that have higher stakes.
- Students explore alternate answers. If they didn't get the question "right" on the first try, they are very happy to explore the other answer. In addition, when other distrators are plausible, students will also explore the reasoning behind other choices, even after they've found what an instructor might label as the "best" answer.
- Faculty mostly don't adjust their approach in class based on student responses to pre-class quizzes. They can, but they mostly don't.
Some ideas I have, but which I don't know how to support include
- Students are more likely to engage in meaningful learning when confronted with richer questions.
- Faculty are more likely to ask interesting questions when they have to write feedback for each distractor.
This last is really the crux of what has made duck useful. One faculty member was transformed by using duck. His example was that before he started using duck, he asked questions like
How many membranes does the mitochondrion have?
- 1
- 2
- 3
The feedback for 2 was easy, but what you do you say about "1" or "3"? There isn't anything to say other than "Wrong". A question from last fall's class looks like this
In the presence of uncouplers that allow protons to pass directly through the inner mitochondrial membrane, would the rate of electron transport increase or decrease?
- Increase
- Decrease
The first question asks whether or not the student "knows" something. The second question asks whether they understand a model and can reason effectively with that model. I think that using duck helps faculty see the shortcomings of their existing questions. It doesn't help all faculty, though. It particularly doesn't help the vast majority of Chemistry and Physics faculty who aren't interested in conceptual models at all -- at least not in large introductory courses anyway. The courses at that level seem to be mostly about figuring out which algorithm to use, transmogrifying the data to get the units right, and then chugging through the formula. Blech. No wonder I never liked physics or chemistry.