Failure of online quizzing to improve performance in introductory psychology courses.

Abstract

Online quizzing tools cost both money (students) and time (faculty and students) to implement; if online quizzes boost class performance, then the extra cost can be justified. Although many studies have found that students who use online quizzes do better on tests than their classmates who do not, these studies are frequently confounded by a variety of factors. For example, some studies allow students to self-select into user and nonuser groups (e.g., Grimstad & Grabe, 2004), leaving open a question about good students being more likely to use online quizzing tools. Others have found that online quizzing produces only marginal and selective improvement in course performance (e.g., Bartini, 2008). In contrast to these more hesitant findings, other areas of the literature reveal robust evidence for a number of best practices for improving student learning (see Dunn, Saville, Baker, & Marek, 2013) such as testing and spacing effects. Our objective was to see if online study tools could produce these effects in real undergraduate classes (as opposed to within the laboratory). Undergraduate students enrolled in introductory psychology courses were provided access to publisherprovided content (Norton) and were required to use online quizzing. In the first experiment, the spacing of the online content was manipulated. In the second experiment, the requirement for completing online quizzing was manipulated within subjects. Online tools did not improve performance on in-class quizzes nor did they influence in-class exam performance. The findings of our study underscore the importance of creating online content that demonstrates improved student learning.

Putting evidence‐based claims to the test: A multi‐site classroom study of retrieval practice and spaced practice

“…Retrieval practice and spaced practice should ideally form a large part of students' self‐directed study strategies (Karpicke, Butler, & Roediger, ; Kornell & Bjork, ). Whereas some researchers have already tried simple interventions to get students to increase retrieval practice using online quizzes developed by textbook publishers (Gurung, ; Van Camp & Baugh, ), there are conflicting findings on the use of online quizzes to foster retrieval practice (Bell, Simone, & Whitfield, ). A key goal of the current study was to systematically examine how best to use online quizzes to test the utility of retrieval practice while also manipulating spacing.…”

Examining the Testing Effect in University Teaching: Retrievability and Question Format Matter

“…Other studies are limited because they lack a restudy control condition but compare the testing condition to conditions in which no exposure to information subsequent to the initial learning took place (McDaniel et al, 2007a, 2011, 2013; Johnson and Kiviniemi, 2009; Mayer et al, 2009; Vojdanoska et al, 2010; Lyle and Crawford, 2011; Roediger et al, 2011; Marsh et al, 2012; Shapiro and Gordon, 2012; Bell et al, 2015; Downs, 2015; Khanna, 2015; Batsell et al, 2017; Foss and Pirozzolo, 2017). In these studies, the testing effect is confounded with differences in exposure to and engagement with learning content, which severely limits the interpretation of their findings.…”

Assessing consumer literacy on financial complex products

“…Studies using multiple instruments and the completion of reading quizzes were related to both better exam and course performance (Johnson & Kiviniemi, 2009;Jovanovic et al, 1994). The quiz test score measure performs better than the self-assessments when literacy is treated as an event variable (Bell et al, 2015).…”