Clearly, you not only need to know HOW to do an exercise in terms of using its functionality, you also need to know WHY you are doing an exercise and how to do it to MAXIMISE ITS EFFECTIVENESS as a learning tool.

What are exercises for?

Exercises are intended to help you learn things. This is not the place to discuss what 'learning' is and how it differs from 'memorizing', for example, but the basic idea is that if you have learned something, you can apply what you have learned independently. In other words, learning enables doing.

Generally speaking, if you have learned something — as opposed to having just memorized it — you will be able to apply what you have learned in different (but analogous) situations to the one in which you first learned it.

Learning and testing

It is important to realize that there is a big difference between learning and testing.

Arising out of our experience in traditional educational systems we assume that an 'exercise' is just another word for a 'test'. The exercises in this module are not tests.

In a traditional learning context a test is a hurdle:

• It presents an obstacle to the learner, in that it is designed to expose deficiencies and weaknesses.
• It is something you either get past or you do not, and as such is associated with success or failure.
• For anyone but the very best students, a test is an unpleasant experience and not one that you usually care to revisit.

How are the exercises in this module different from tests, when, just as with tests, they are also evaluated and incorrect answers are marked in red and scores are displayed?

• Answering questions in an exercise in this module is not 'sudden death'. An exercise usually allows you a number of attempts to revisit incorrect answers and to learn from your mistakes.
• You can revisit exercises any number of times to improve your performance and your score. In traditional exercises this would be called 'cheating', here its called 'learning'.
• Since the purpose of these exercises is learning not testing, they do not need to contain the tricky questions that are such a feature of traditional exercises.
• Exercises have a clear 'scope' that relates to a clearly defined and usually compact section of material. The exercise is a valuable tool which tells you — and you only — how well you know the material in that scope.
• It is an important part of the learning process that on completion of a page you should not be left looking at (and possibly memorizing) incorrect answers. Answers which have been corrected in this way are colour-coded as such, but at the completion of the page the questions are all completed correctly. In other words a testing system leaves wrong answers visible to show you what you have done wrong, whereas a learning system shows you what you should have got right.
• Finally, this module assumes that you want to learn the material it contains. You are your own motivater, so that, in this context, instruments of testing and control would clearly be counter-productive.

Using multiple answer attempts

Most exercises in this module allow you to evaluate your work a number of times before any incorrect answers are replaced with the correct answer and the exercise is completed.

The number of attempts that you are allowed is shown in a field on the control panel, together with a field showing the number of attempts you have actually made.

Instead of evaluating all the gaps at one time, some exercises may evaluate your work gap by gap. The maximum number of attempts shown on the control panel is the number of attempts you are allowed for each gap.

Getting better

This module is a learning tool that is designed to help you improve your performance.

• Unless you get the exercise completely correct at the first attempt you should revisit the exercise, either immediately or at another time. If you don't do this there will be no learning effect from doing the exercise. Even if you did the exercise correctly first time round, an occasional revisit is not wasted time.
• You can start the exercise afresh at any time by clicking the restart button on the control panel, or you can go somewhere else in the module and return to the exercise in the normal way.
• Spending some time at the end of an exercise studying what you did wrongly and why you did it that way is a valuable and essential part of the learning experience. It is for this reason that the correct answers are always displayed at the end of an exercise.
• As a motivated learner with free will, always bear in mind that this is not a test. Getting a 100% score, for example, by just remembering where certain options go without understanding why they go there is just wasting your own time.
• The 'ideal' learner will probably make some mistakes – perhaps even a lot of mistakes – the first time through an exercise. This is ideal because if you, the learner, cannot do any of the questions correctly then this is probably the wrong exercise for you to be doing.
• If, on the other hand, you get every question correct first time — unless, of course, this is an early page in a sequence that gets progressively more difficult — then in doing these questions nothing is really being learnt.
• You, as the ideal learner, will revisit the exercise, sooner or later ending up with the highest accolade: 'all correct at the first attempt'.