Overview: Adaptive Follow-Up assignments

• Use Adaptive Follow-Up assignments
• Adaptive Follow-Up assignments (for students)

Some Mastering assignments can also provide students with "continuously adaptive" learning.

Assignments with personalized Adaptive Follow-Ups

Continuously adaptive learning is enabled by Adaptive Follow-Up activities that are selected specifically for each student and are presented to each student immediately following the regular (Parent) assignment. In Mobile view, a student's Follow-Up may not be visible right away because the Mobile view shows only assignments due in the next 7 days. Students can always switch to a computer to start a Follow-Up assignment immediately.

The activities in a Follow-Up are drawn from your course's publisher-provided Item Library, and are recommended on an ongoing basis for a student based on the student's response to items in the current and previous assignments.

You can add an Adaptive Follow-Up to any Mastering assignment. The more activities students complete, the more the Pearson adaptive learning engine learns about each student, and the more valuable the Follow-Up recommendations become.

Recommendations by the adaptive learning engine

Based on the following data, the Pearson adaptive learning engine recommends Mastering items for an individual student's Adaptive Follow-Up assignment:

• A network of knowledge graphs that map prerequisite and related concepts covered in your course's publisher-provided Item Library
• An individual student's responses to items (and kinds of items) in the Parent assignment and previous assignments, which reveal areas of understanding and misconceptions
• Kinds of items that have helped other students with similar understanding and misconceptions succeed

Adaptive Follow-Up assignments always exclude sequestered items that you have already saved in unscheduled or future assignments, but they may include items from previous assignments, if deemed necessary for review or reinforcement.

Important: Be careful not to inadvertently sequester items! If you are working with a copied course, such as a pre-built course or another instructor’s course, be sure to delete any assignments you don't intend to use. Keeping these assignments could sequester items that should be available for inclusion in Follow-Ups.

Setting up adaptive learning can be as simple as selecting Add Adaptive Follow-Up for a given Mastering assignment and specifying the number of points to be granted for the Follow-Up activities.

Default values for other Follow-Up settings are supplied by Mastering, but you can change these. For details, see Add/Edit an Adaptive Follow-Up.

Mastering delivers individual Adaptive Follow-Up assignments as a series of one or more question sets. Each question set should take about 15–20 minutes, based on Mastering's historical item-duration data.

When students can work on an Adaptive Follow-Up after its Parent

Students can access an Adaptive Follow-Up on a computer when any of the following is true:

• The student has completed the Parent assignment.
• The due date for the Parent assignment has passed.
• The time limit for a timed Parent assignment has been met.

Availability of an Adaptive Follow-Up

• Instructors can only control the due date for the parent assignment.
• When you schedule the Parent assignment, its Follow-Up is automatically scheduled, as well.
• The Follow-Up appears on student calendars as soon as the Parent assignment is available to students.
• Each Follow-Up assignment remains available for practice or review until the end of the course.

Students complete the Parent assignment as they normally would. They are then immediately given access to the Adaptive Follow-Up assignment.

A Follow-Up consists of one or more sets of questions, according to the Follow-Up assignment settings. Each student's question sets include activities that specifically address the areas where he or she had difficulty with the Parent assignment.

Students who test out

If you allow students to test out of the Follow-Up by earning a score you specify for the Parent assignment, students who achieve that score receive all points for the Follow-Up automatically, without having to complete any follow-up question sets.

• Students test out when they reach or exceed the specified score on the Parent assignment, regardless of whether they actually complete all questions in the Parent assignment.
• Mastering does not round up scores that may be close to the test-out score, like 89.8% for test-out score of 90%. The test-out score must be reached to test out of the Adaptive Follow-Up.

The Follow-Up appears in the Completed Assignments area of the student Course Home and is marked as Complete on the student Course Calendar. If these students open the Follow-Up, they see a congratulatory message instead of question sets.

In a class, one group of students can receive adaptive follow-up scores by testing out of an adaptive follow-up while another group of students are exempted from the follow-up assignment for a Parent assignment.

Students are exempted automatically when there’s not enough content to present an adaptive follow-up. To help students who can benefit from a follow-up assignment, see tips about selecting content for the parent assignment.