Before choosing and developing your skill-builders, think about the following questions.
- What are the specific things students are supposed to learn in/from this chapter?
- What is the best way for them to demonstrate that they have learned these?
Remember that a skill-builder doesn’t have to be long to be effective. Often, a short, targeted skill-building activity is the most effective way to help readers assess how well they have understood something and/or how well they can apply what they have learned.
Using different kinds of skill-builders also encourages different ways of thinking about and applying concepts and information, so consider how to best use various skill-builders throughout your content. Note that while using different types of skill-builders will help maintain student engagement and offer complementary learning opportunities, it’s often helpful to pair single skill-builders with specific topics. Keep these technical considerations in mind:
- Skill-builder types cannot be mixed with one another in a single set of exercises or individual activity; for instance, it’s not possible to alternate between fill in the blank(s) and drag the word answers.
- However, select skill-builder types can be combined in longer question sets, which have connected series of individual skill-builders or are added to more complex activity types.*
Your Active Learning editor can share examples that will clarify these points and show what such activities and exercises look like on the digital page.
Well-thought-out and well-written skill-builders are a great way to move students from being passive consumers of content to active participants in their own learning. To learn more about each skill-builder introduced here, explore the additional targeted resource for each type of skill-builder. Your Active Learning project editor can also help you decide what will work best for your content, goals, and students.
* Question sets may combine drag the words, fill in the blanks, mark the words, true/false, multiple-choice and multiple-answer, and/or drag and drop activities.