A technological enhanced self-assessment activity to reduce university drop-out

Passage from secondary school to university can be difficult for our students if they are not properly followed by instructors. To curtail the high university drop-out rate detected in various countries, a set of self-assessment activities must be devised by teachers to furnish students an important help in organizing their personal study-method and to gain a proper self- government. In this context, we realized a self-assessment activity for Physics courses based on Multiple Answers Questionnaire. The most intriguing features of this tool are: the possibility to choose arguments that makes this product useful during study and as self- evaluation (prior of final exam), the large number of questions in the database (and a simple way to enlarge it at will). The questionnaires are randomly selected (from the database), and the possibility to send a final report to instructors for discussions and suggestions is also allowed. From a technological point of view, this activity has been inserted into the Learning Management System and integrated with a database to store the entire set of completed questionnaires. As a consequence it is possible to perform (the most deep) statistical analysis either on single student/teacher/topic or on the entire community/program, which offers an innovative objective evaluation of didactic materials.