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We compared students' learning behavior when completing identical online calculus-based physics homework assignments organized in two ways. One was designed for mastery learning where content is divided into smaller units, and students are required to attempt the assessment once before accessing the content. Students can proceed to the next unit after passing the assessment either before or after studying the content. The second is a conventional design in which students first study a set of instructional materials equivalent to several mastery units then complete multiple assessment problems at once. Our major findings are: 1. in the mastery condition, students solved more problems correctly either immediately after studying the instructional content, or on attempts before accessing the instructional content; 2. for students who solved similar numbers of problems correctly, the mastery condition students spent significantly less time studying compared to the traditional condition students; and 3. students who did not pass mastery units on their initial assessment attempts spent similar amounts of time studying as traditional condition students. 

This study investigates patterns in students' learning and problem-solving behavior as they proceed through a sequence of 10 mastery-based online learning modules and how these patterns correlate with overall course outcome. Students' interaction with each module, as measured by analyzing the platform log data, was categorized into nine different states. The student population was divided into top, middle and bottom cohorts based on their total course credit, and we visualized each cohort's distribution among the nine states over the 10 modules using a series of parallel coordinates graphs. We found that the patterns of interaction were mostly similar on the first six modules, but are significantly different on modules 7-10. For the later modules, the top cohort mostly concentrated on the state corresponding to high problem-solving effort after learning, while the majority of the bottom cohort did not access the learning materials after multiple failed attempts. 

We compared students' learning behavior when completing identical online calculus-based physics homework assignments organized in two ways. One was designed for mastery learning where content is divided into smaller units, and students are required to attempt the assessment once before accessing the content. Students can proceed to the next unit after passing the assessment either before or after studying the content. The second is a conventional design in which students first study a set of instructional materials equivalent to several mastery units then complete multiple assessment problems at once. Our major findings are: 1. in the mastery condition, students solved more problems correctly either immediately after studying the instructional content, or on attempts before accessing the instructional content; 2. for students who solved similar numbers of problems correctly, the mastery condition students spent significantly less time studying compared to the traditional condition students; and 3. students who did not pass mastery units on their initial assessment attempts spent similar amounts of time studying as traditional condition students.