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In a core mechanical engineering course on numerical methods at the University of South Florida in the fall of 2022, students were presented with discussion questions to serve as metacognitive activities. The course consisted of eight topics, and after each topic, the students were asked a single discussion question. While answering these questions was optional for the students, it served as 2% extra credit for the eight questions of the course. This initiative was initially taken to offset any occasional missed 30 online homework assignments, which accounted for 15% of the grade for the semester. These questions were designed to elicit thoughtful and unique responses from the students. To promote learning from others, students were allowed to see posted responses from other students only after they had submitted theirs. The questions ranged from making a meme to describing a difficult or intuitive concept. Despite the opportunity for extra credit and the unique prompts, the participation rate was only 59% of the possible submissions, and no clear trend was observed between the participation of high- or low-performing students.
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Using a Planning Prompt Survey to Encourage Early Completion of Homework Assignments
In an earlier study we showed that small amounts of extra credit offered for early progress on online homework assignments can reduce cramming behavior in introductory physics students. This work expands on the prior study by implementing a planning prompt intervention inspired by Yeomans and Reich's similar treatment. In the prompt we asked students to what degree they intended to earn extra credit offered for early work on the module sequence, and what their plan was to realize their intentions. The survey was assigned for ordinary course credit and due several days before the first extra credit deadline. We found that students who completed the prompt earned on average 0.6 more extra credit points and completed the modules an average of 1.1 days earlier compared to a previous semester. We detect the impact of the survey by creating a multilinear model based on data from students exposed to the intervention as well as students in a previous semester. Data from five homework sequences are included in the model to account for differences between the two semesters that cannot be attributed to the planning prompt intervention.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1845436
- PAR ID:
- 10404028
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- L@S 2022 - Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 446 to 450
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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In a core mechanical engineering course on numerical methods at the University of South Florida in the fall of 2022, students were presented with discussion questions to serve as metacognitive activities. The course consisted of eight topics, and after each topic, the students were asked a single discussion question. While answering these questions was optional for the students, it served as 2% extra credit for the eight questions of the course. This initiative was initially taken to offset any occasional missed 30 online homework assignments, which accounted for 15% of the grade for the semester. These questions were designed to elicit thoughtful and unique responses from the students. To promote learning from others, students were allowed to see posted responses from other students only after they had submitted theirs. The questions ranged from making a meme to describing a difficult or intuitive concept. Despite the opportunity for extra credit and the unique prompts, the participation rate was only 59% of the possible submissions, and no clear trend was observed between the participation of high- or low-performing students.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3491140.3528297
