Overview

Are you struggling on your assessments? This article reviews common causes for low assessment scores and provides recommendations to help you improve.

Improve Your Training Habits

Training is the most important part of Membean. If you don't have good training habits, you may struggle with your assessments. Here are some questions to ask yourself: 

  • Are you meeting your teacher's training expectations? 
  • Is your accuracy at least 65%? 
  • Are you spending at least 30 seconds actively reviewing the word page when you answer a question incorrectly?
  • Are you actively engaged and focused when you train? 

If you answered "no" to any of these questions, then improving your training will likely help you on assessments. Set a training improvement goal for yourself; you may even want to work on one positive change per week. Make a plan to meet that goal, and keep track of your progress.

For example, if you are only training once per week, then make a goal to train three times per week. At the beginning of each week, decide the days and the times you are going to train. Write down a schedule or set reminders on your device to help you stay on track. 

Spend More Time on Your Assessments

How much time do you spend on your assessments? If you regularly have a lot of time left over when you submit your quiz, then you may need to spend more time reviewing your answers. When you move too quickly through an assessments, it's easy to choose the wrong answer. Membean quizzes are written to truly test your depth of understanding, so several answers may have key words that relate to the question but are not correct.

Slowing down and reading each question carefully will help prevent mistakes. Students who are struggling on their assessments often improve significantly when they stop rushing through their quizzes.

Use SATA Strategies

Are you having a difficult time with select-all-that-apply (what we call SATA) questions? SATA questions are more challenging than single answer multiple choice questions, so you may need to approach them differently. Here are some strategies to help you improve your SATA game. 

  • Make sure you understand what the question is asking or telling you to look for. 
  • Treat each option as its own yes/no or true/false question. 
  • Individually go over each option as opposed to reading them all first. 
  • Don't compare options. You must make a separate decision about each answer. 
  • Take your time. These question types take much longer than regular multiple choice questions. 

One key step that many students skip is reviewing missed SATA questions. Struggling with and getting questions incorrect is a good thing for your long-term memory. Even though it can be frustrating to get things wrong, that struggle means the word is going to come back stronger next time. After you submit a quiz, go back and look over the questions you answered incorrectly. Reviewing them will help you on your next assessment. 

Review Your IKT List

Any word that you have marked as IKT (I Know This) is fair game for assessments. If you are missing words on assessments that you have marked as IKT, then you should un-skip those words. You may even want to review your list of IKT words and remove that label from any that you cannot confidently use in a sentence. 

Don't Treat Training Like Test Taking

Don't use test taking strategies such as the process of elimination to answer questions during training when you don't really know the answer. This can actually get in the way of learning. 

Training should be treated like a learning playground, not like a test. If you can figure out the answer to the question, but you don't actually remember the word well, then you should select I'm Not Sure. This gives you the opportunity to restudy the word. It will lower your training accuracy, but as long as your accuracy stays above 65 or 70 percent, then you're doing well! Restudying words you don't know well will help you learn them, which in turn will help you on your assessments. 

When in doubt, it's always better to select I'm Not Sure than it is to take your best guess.