Measuring the effect of amount of required student effort on exam performance

In this thesis, I examine the relationship between the amount of required effort from students and their performance on the corresponding exams in an introductory programming class. I employed an online learning system PrairieLearn which is able to require that students complete each question correctly multiple times to receive full scores in order to quantify the amount of work students have done. Two groups of students are assigned different minimum points required in order to get a full score in a quiz. Their effort is quantified by their number of attempts and the time spent on quizzes. The findings do not show a difference between two groups. The students from both groups do not show a significant difference in their exam scores. However, the results strongly suggests that students who get higher scores in the exam spend fewer tries but a similar amount of time on quizzes to get the correct answers. The study also assign questions to two groups which experience different grading treatment on the same set of questions. Group B, which has a tougher grading treatment, is compensated with extra points towards the total quiz score. The findings show that the students in group B submit about 40\% fewer incorrect answers. The study concludes that the effort from each student in online quizzes does not show a correlation with their exam performance, and they check answers more carefully in online quizzes when they perceive that there are more points at stake.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2018

Author dc:creator

• Cheng, Hong

Contributors dc:contributor

• Zilles, Craig
• Davis, Neal

• computer education
• online quiz
• introductory-level programming

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2018 Hong Cheng

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/101074

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F101074