Application of an interactive exercise tool: student activity, performance and satisfaction in a Household Technology course

ItkA is a new interactive exercise software tool, which provides both a training mode and a test mode. Arandom generator compiles exercises from a question database. In each test, students have the opportunity to score up to 50 points. The construction of ItkA is based on Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives in the cognitive domain. ItkA has been tested and evaluated in a Household Technology course. In addition to attending face-to-face lectures, students had the opportunity to practise as much as they wanted to, parallel to which seven tests were provided and evaluated. Furthermore, data were collected by use of a preliminary survey and a follow-up survey. The aim of the study was to learn more about students' learning activities and learning behaviour in the Household Technology course. The authors evaluated the students' degree of participation and their results on the tests provided. Finally, student satisfaction with course support and with the design of the course was evaluated. The results clearly show that students only learn actively when lecturers give detailed advice or tasks. Although the test results were surprisingly good, half of the students had difficulties in organizing themselves and were not able to pass all the tests in the given period. There is a significant negative correlation between average test results and the number of questions in the database. In addition, a significant positive correlation between average test time and the number of database questions was found. To minimize this effect, the number of questions should be increased for certain topics. The participants were very satisfied with the course and software support. They rated the whole course as 'good' and the ItkA software as slightly, but significantly, better. In summary, ItkA contributes to the improvement of Household Technology courses. Furthermore, the whole course organization was highly consistent with the needs of the students. It is, therefore, recommended that ItkA is implemented in future courses in Household Technology as well as in other courses.