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Working with the Personal Study Plan (PSP) in WebAssign

What is the Personal Study Plan?Many WebAssign products include a Personal Study Plan (PSP). The PSP is a set of chapter quizzes, practice quizzes, and instructional materials that your students can use to learn, practice, and test their knowledge at their own pace.

Features of the Personal Study Plan include the following:Customized Content Selection: You can select specific chapters and sections of the textbook to be covered by the Personal Study Plan. You can also flag key concepts that you want your students to pay special attention to.

Practice Quizzes: For each section included in the Personal Study Plan, your students can take a practice quiz with a randomized set of questions covering the section. Your students can retake practice quizzes until they know the material, with a new set of randomized questions each time.

In many ways, practice quizzes behave like regular assignments except: • Practice quizzes never count toward your students’ grades. • There is no due date. • Submission of the entire quiz is required. • After submitting the quiz, your students can see which questions they answered correctly and which they missed. They

can also use Practice Another Version for questions with randomized values.

After submitting the quiz, your students can take it again with a different set of randomly selected questions. Students can take a new version of the quiz as many times as needed.

Chapter Quizzes: For each chapter included in the Personal Study Plan, your students can take a chapter quiz with a randomized set of questions covering the included sections of the chapter. Questions on chapter quizzes might require synthesis of multiple concepts and be more challenging than questions on section quizzes. Your students can retake chapter quizzes until they know the material, with a new set of randomized questions each time.

In many ways, chapter quizzes behave like regular assignments except: • You determine whether chapter quizzes count toward your students’ grades. • If chapter quizzes count toward your students’ grades, all chapter quiz scores are averaged to determine the Personal

Study Plan category average. You will set the weight of the Personal Study Plan category in your gradebook. • There is no due date. • Entire assignment submission is required. • After submitting the quiz, your students can see which questions they answered correctly and which they missed. They

can also use Practice Another Version for questions with randomized values. • After submitting the quiz, your students can take it again with a different set of randomly selected questions. Students

can take a new version of the quiz as many times as needed.

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Targeted Instructional Materials: Each section of the textbook included in a Personal Study Plan has tutorial materials that your students can use to learn specific topics. After your students take a chapter or practice quiz, each student’s list of tutorial materials for a section suggests specific tutorials that relate to the questions she missed for that section. The instructional materials vary by textbook, but often include videos, practice problems, and passages from the text.

Visual Progress Indicators: After your students take a chapter or practice quiz, they can view their performance in relation to the mastery levels you set for the Personal Study Plan. The visual indicators make it easy for students to identify the sections that they have mastered and which sections they need to study more. By default, the mastery level indicator is set to 80%.

The indicators change color based on the score: • Green indicates that the score equals or exceeds the mastery level. • Yellow indicates that the score is at least 75% of the mastery level. • Red indicates that the score is less than 75% of the mastery level.

Your students can take Personal Study Plan quizzes and review the instructional materials in any order. This helps your students to use the Personal Study Plan when reviewing for tests.

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Suggestions for using the Personal Study Plan

Remediation: If you are teaching a course for which students often need a refresher on what they learned the previous term (for example, the second part of a two‐ semester course), you might use the Personal Study Plan to allow students to review and test themselves on that knowledge.

Test Preparation: Students often ask for the ability to retake homework assignments in WebAssign as a test preparation tool. The Personal Study Plan lets your students take and retake quizzes covering specific sections of the textbook in order to prepare for tests.

Supplementary Instruction: Sometimes, your students need to learn more material than the length of the school term permits you to cover in class — for example, to score well on a standardized placement test. You can use the Personal Study Plan to provide instructional materials and self-tests on the material that you cannot cover in class.

Homework: If you are not concerned with when your students do their homework, but only that they learn the material, use the Personal Study Plan instead of creating dozens of homework assignments. You can even count your students’ performance on the Personal Study Plan chapter quizzes toward their final grade.

Enabling the Personal Study Plan in Your CourseAfter you select your textbook in the Creating a New Course page, select Enable Personal Study Plan. If you miss this step or later decide to enable the Personal Study Plan, click Jump to Class and select your class. The Class View page will be displayed.1. Click Edit Class Settings.2. In the Class Settings page, under Textbooks and Additional Resources,

select Enable Personal Study Plan.3. Click Save.

After enabling the Personal Study Plan for your course, you must configure it and select which chapters and sections to display to your students. From here, you can select Settings to configure the PSP for your course, or you can always access the PSP from the Personal Study Plan Tab in your Class View.

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Personal Study Plan Settings for Self Study:

When you enable the PSP, all textbook chapters and sections will be made available to your students for self-study. You will be able to make the following customizations for your course by selecting Settings:

• Select the check box for each chapter and section you want to include, and clear the check box for those you do not want in the plan.

• Flag Key Concepts for students

• Set Mastery Level Indicators for chapter and practice quizzes that you want your students to aim for. The default mastery level is 80%.

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Setting up the Personal Study Plan for a Grade:

You also have the option to have the Personal Study Plan count toward your students’ final grade. In order to do this, you must first set up your WebAssign Gradebook.

Note: You cannot set the Personal Study Plan to count toward your students’ final grades if your WebAssign GradeBook is not set up, does not calculate a final grade, or calculates the final grade based on points.

To set up the Personal Study Plan as part of your Gradebook:

1. Click the Personal Study Plan tab.2. Click Settings. The Personal Study Plan settings window is displayed.3. For Students to receive credit for each chapter completed, select Personal Study Plan as proof of Mastery.4. The Gradebook category weights are displayed. (The Personal Study Plan category is labeled PSP textbook name at the end of the category list).5. Edit the category weights as needed. You can edit the weight not only for the Personal Study Plan category, but also for any other category.

Best Practice: Set the Personal Study Plan category to be worth 5% of the total. This is usually enough credit to keep your students motivated, but not so much that it is a major factor in the course grade.

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Viewing Your Students’ Performance on the Personal Study Plan:

You can access an overview your class’s performance on each chapter and section of the Personal Study Plan by selecting the Personal Study Plan Tab on your My Classes or Class View Page.

• The class average will be displayed for each Chapter and Section Level Quiz. Student scores are based on the students’ last attempt at the quiz.

• The number of students that have attempted the Chapter and Section Level Quizzes will be indicated. • Clicking on the Progress Bar will display each student’s score for the selected quiz. You can then drill further to view

individual student responses by clicking on the student name.

Note: Chapter quiz scores reflect each student’s last attempt on the chapter quiz. Practice quiz scores reflect each student’s last attempt to answer Personal Study Plan questions for the selected section on either the chapter quiz or the practice quiz.

Note: When viewing student responses for practice quizzes, sometimes the responses shown do not correspond with the score. For example, a student with a displayed score of 80% might show no response for every question. This occurs when the student’s last attempt to answer a question for the section was on the chapter quiz and not the practice quiz..

If student’s responses for the practice quiz do not correspond with the displayed score, view responses for the chapter instead.

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