Weekly Quizzes in Lieu of Homework in Large Sections

Abstract

The best paper in the Mechanical Engineering Division at the 2022 ASEE Annual Meeting in Minneapolis showed that student learning increased with weekly quizzes rather than daily homework. 1 The authors' work built on several recent papers showing that mastery learning with multiple attempts at each quiz increased student success. [2][3][4] Engineering Statics at NC State University has long included daily homework assignments, so the pivot to weekly quizzes will need to be adopted over multiple semesters and adopted for large enrollment sections. This work-in-progress paper details the methods we used to administer weekly quizzes to a class enrollment of almost 400 students with minimal grading help. As we were unable to create multiple quizzes in one semester, we can evaluate whether multiple quizzes are necessary to see the increase in student learning. Our comparison is between students enrolled in Fall 2021 and Fall 2022. Both semesters required daily homework quizzes in Moodle (3 attempts, highest score taken), but for Fall 2022 the on-paper homework was left as optional and the weekly quiz was implemented. We show a slight improvement in the average midterm grades despite having only one attempt at most quizzes.