Case Study: Motivating through Quizzes

My name is Michael Galligan. I’m an Accounting and Business teacher with East Glendalough School, in Wicklow, Ireland. It is a second-level state school in the Republic of Ireland with students aged from 11 to 19.

I had some students with writing and minor learning difficulties and initially I simply wanted to make the class material available at home, so they could go through it whenever they want to, at their own pace and with no need to write anything down.

In truth, I’m not sure where I first heard about iSpring Suite. I’m just glad I did. I then discovered the quiz aspect and thought this would be good as a system for checking the level of knowledge, for both the students and me. And then I saw how big the potential really was. Mini quizzes at the end of each section give the students an opportunity to have several attempts and get individualized feedback messages depending on whether the answer is right/wrong or, more importantly, partially right. Such tests help them to learn, give them self-confidence and allow them to set their personal bar much higher.

I also love the ability to have the results emailed to me. My younger students now follow up on their classwork and complete their quizzes at home. They can repeat these as often as they like if they want to achieve a perfect 100%, and they do! What a fantastic tool for motivation! I love when they come to me disgruntled with their 98%, and they head straight back to find how they can make the result better.

As someone (much younger than me) might say, RESULT!

I’ve used iSpring since March of 2015 and I’m really delighted as I now have a system that allows me to make my courses available for students whenever they need it, so that they can study at their own pace. iSpring makes it possible to cater to different learning styles, while providing assessment for learning as well as formative assessment always available for revision. It enhances self-motivation and allows me to keep updated on the learners’ progress and level of engagement.

Plus, all this is done in a system that is simple and straightforward to use, yet which constantly delights me as I discover the scope of features it contains.

As for iSpring technical support, I’ve had a pleasure of dealing through email with support engineer Olga Matt. The people in an organisation are always its real strength and I cannot praise her highly enough and I thank her for the support she has provided me with.

I would recommend iSpring for anyone involved in education. I think it provides a greater potential to assist both teachers and students than anything else out there today, either free or paid.