SELF-ASSESSMENT IN ONLINE LEARNING: WHY BOTHER?

For two consecutive semesters we have taught an online required, 2-credit Earth and Space Science course designed for elementary education majors. To encourage students to read and review the relevant textbook chapters, we used self-assessment (SA) quizzes that grade automatically and give feedback to students. To test if this style of formative assessment is a valuable learning tool, we analyzed the assessment results collected from BlackBoard (Bb). In the first semester the students were required to complete weekly SA quizzes consisting of 10 questions taken from a SA test bank provided by the textbook publisher and administered through Bb. Collectively, the 14 SA quizzes were worth 5% of the final course grade; students had unlimited attempts and no time restrictions. In the second semester the SA was optional but the availability and settings did not change.

On average students spent a little more time completing the SA when it was required (8.8 minutes) than when it was optional (6.6 min). The minimum average time was 2.4 minutes in both semesters. On average each student attempted the quiz three times in Fall 2011 and less than 0.5 times in Spring 2012. Our results show that most students completed the SA only when it was required. In Fall 2011 students who did better in the course, i.e. earned higher grades, completed more than 11 SAs and spent on average >15 minutes on them, suggesting that they used them in the way that we had intended them to. This pattern was not found when the quiz was optional.

Our results question the usefulness of the investment made in online SA that accompanies most textbooks. We show that when SA is optional, student participation is low and there is no correlation between SA usage and course grade. When it is required, students who took more time and did them regularly earned a better course grade. However, we cannot exclude that this simply reflects that better students have better online study habits.