Understanding the Learning Mastery Calculation

[AndreaMorlini]

I am new to assessment in Canvas and am in the process of testing some of the features to use for assessment purposes-mainly aligning quiz banks in classic quizzes to learning outcomes and using that data to report student mastery of our general education outcomes. Here is one test scenario I have done so far: 

1. Created an outcome at the admin level with a 1 point scale-1 point meets expectations and 0 points does not meet expectations. For that outcome I set mastery at 0.6 points and chose highest score as the calculation method. 

2. I aligned that outcome with a quiz bank of 3 questions (worth 1 point each). When aligning the outcome and quiz bank, I set mastery at 50%. 

3. I added all three questions to a quiz. Test student took the quiz and got 2 of 3 questions aligned with this outcome correct. 

The mastery score for the test student in the above scenario is 0.73. It is measured against the .6 that is presumably the mastery score I set at the admin level for the outcome. How is Canvas calculating this 0.73 mastery score? I am also a bit confused about how this translates-the admin level outcome is set with points but when aligning with the question bank it is a % score. When hovering over the outcome in the learning mastery gradebook, it tells me the 100% of students (currently just the one student) are not meeting expectations-presumably because the outcome score is below 1. It seems that Canvas is measuring mastery using the percent score against the points score and I am not sure if that is measuring what we intend to measure. I want to be able to use Canvas to determine how many students in a given course are achieving a specific % mastery of an outcome-is that possible to do using classic quizzes and aligning the outcomes to question banks? 

Any insight can be helpful, thank you for considering my question!

[igustafson]

Hello @AndreaMorlini ,

Thank you for contacting us. I found a breakdown of how each type is scored here https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/How-do-I-manage-outcome-mastery-calculations-in-an-ac... this should help explain how depending on the outcome type its showing your scores. If you have further questions you can contact Canvas support https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Basics-Guide/How-do-I-contact-Canvas-Support/ta-p/389767 as they can look into each item with you to make sure its calculating correctly. 

[AndreaMorlini · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the response. It seems that per the instructions you linked, that functionality isn't enabled at my institution. We were actually able to answer the question we had on our own about figuring out how the math behind the mastery scores for an objective based test (not using a rubric). Thank you!