How to STACKrate

The Development of an Intuitive Evaluation Tool

Abstract

Understanding the students’ perception of STACK tasks is vital for optimizing the students’ learning. Questionnaires are a common method to learn about their experiences, but they are time-consuming for teachers and students. Plus, they are usually answered with a certain delay after students have completed the task. To solve these problems, we developed STACKrate, a JavaScript-based tool that allows teachers to easily integrate a collection of evaluation questions directly into STACK questions. Thus, the evaluation is done directly after the students completed their work on the tasks. The tool uses a star rating principle and is designed to be intuitive and easy to use for students. In this paper, we describe the features and benefits of STACKrate and tell about the use of the tool in a course at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. We then discuss the added value of STACKrate in evaluation over the use of questionnaires alone.