Quest Ladder
TeachFORGE.ai
Quest Ladder / Confidence and active learning
Confidence, remediation, pre-steps and interleaving
Ask how sure they are, act on the answer, and bring earlier topics back between steps.
How sure they are tells you more than whether they were right.
Session-level, not type-level
Active learning & confidence applies to the whole ladder session — confidence ratings, step predictions and interleaving — rather than to individual question types.
That is why these three techniques appear in the pedagogy catalogue but have no fields on a question type. They happen between steps, so they belong to the thing that has steps.
Confidence and remediation
Ask for a 1–10 topic confidence rating when advancing between ladder steps turns the rating on. It is the input for everything else here, and it is also what makes exit routing's confidence dimension meaningful across the ladder.
Then: when confidence is at or below the threshold, serve another question from the same step until confidence improves. The Remediation threshold (1–10) defaults to 7, and the setting uses the learner's confidence history on this ladder to judge whether they need more practice before moving on.
A threshold of 7 sounds high and is about right. A learner reporting 6 out of 10 on a topic is telling you something real, and the cost of one more question now is far lower than the cost of building the next three steps on sand.
Predictive pre-steps
Predictive pre-step at each new step asks a learner to predict what a section will cover before they start it. The default prompt is set here — the placeholder suggests Before you begin: write what you expect this section to cover — and any step can override it on the canvas.
It costs a few seconds and reliably improves what a learner takes from the step, because it forces them to notice what they already think.
Interleaving review
Interleaving review nudges between steps inserts a review question periodically. Insert review every N steps sets the rhythm, and Review question source decides where the question comes from:
- Same step's question type — more of the current topic.
- Earlier steps on this ladder — the usual choice, and what makes a long ladder retain.
- Other ladders you own (same teacher) — genuine interleaving across topics.
The third is the strongest for retention and the most disruptive to flow. On a ladder that is a single coherent unit, earlier steps is the better setting; across a term's worth of material, the cross-ladder source is what stops week one being forgotten by week six.
Watching for disengagement
A further setting watches for rapid wrong answers, which is what disengagement looks like in the data: a learner clicking through rather than working. It is worth having on, because the pattern is invisible in a score and obvious in the timing.