RECAPP – Interactive Quizzes for Active Learning

RECAPP RECAPP is a quiz tool where students can contribute questions and answer options for quizzes. With RECAPP, quizzes can be created, edited, and conducted. This promotes student-driven recapitulation of course content.

How does RECAPP work?

RECAPP is browser-based. All members of the University of Göttingen can log in to recapp.uni-goettingen.de using their regular university login and create, edit, and answer quizzes. Contributing and answering questions does not require a login and can be done from anywhere via a link. There are free-text questions, multiple-choice questions, and single-choice questions.

How can I use RECAPP?

• Recapitulation: At the end of a course session, students recapitulate the course content by creating questions and answers. At the beginning of the next course session, the entire class answers all contributed questions as a second recapitulation from a new perspective.
• Encourage active listening during lectures: Students should think of questions about the material being taught during the lecture and enter them into RECAPP during short lecture breaks.
• Practice formulating good questions: Questions can be research questions or simply questions about a very general topic to practice the skill of questioning itself.
• Support the Inverted Classroom: Deepen and solidify the understanding of Inverted-Classroom materials before the session by requiring students to enter at least one question per topic in RECAPP.
• Exam preparation: Students create potential exam questions and add them to an exam question pool in RECAPP.

Advantages of RECAPP

• Formulating questions as an essential instrument of learning how to learn, thereby promoting understanding of learned material and more conscious awareness of knowledge gaps.
• Implementation of the Peer Instruction principle ("Learning by Teaching"), thereby strengthening the consolidation of learned material and fostering a deeper understanding of content and perspectives.
• Encouragement of creativity
• RECAPP is open-source, user-friendly, secure, and designed from the outset for contributing questions

What should I keep in mind?

• Device availability or willingness to use them might be heterogeneous
• It takes twice the time in a course, so consider collecting questions over multiple course sessions before answering them, or conduct the creation and answering of questions asynchronously and only discuss the results in plenary
• Explicitly highlight the importance of recapitulation to overcome lower motivation, as creating questions as a creative process can be demanding
• Emphasize the importance of participation for one's own learning process – however, lack of student participation is not very visible

Who is RECAPP suitable for?

• Students: For individual follow-up of seminars and lectures
• Instructors: For didactic enhancement and activation of learners

RECAPP is a free service provided by the University of Göttingen and available to all instructors, students, and guest users. Try it out here. Tutorials and teaching-learning scenarios can be found here. A practical introduction to RECAPP and its functions will be offered on June 12, 2025, as part of the Lunch Bag Sessions, where the tool will be thoroughly presented.