IMPROVING STUDENT LEARNING AND CONFIDENCE IN INTRODUCTORY GEOLOGY WITH THE CLASS QUIZ TOOL

Introductory geology students often struggle to master course learning objectives (LOs) and recognize which content and skills areas they should emphasize in preparing for exams. The Confidence-based Learning Accuracy Support System (CLASS) is an online tool designed to help students study course content using quiz questions directly aligned to course LOs (Jones & McConnell, 2022). Additionally, as they take the quizzes, CLASS guides students in metacognitive assessment by asking them to rank their confidence in the correctness of their response for each question. Confidence ratings are made on a continuous linear scale, which is compared to their success (right or wrong answer) to generate a “calibration” score (the absolute value of the confidence rating minus their performance; Jones & McConnell, 2022). The best calibrated students will have a small gap, or a small calibration value. We expected best calibrated students would also have the highest performance on CLASS quizzes and the course overall. In AY 22/23, students in introductory geology courses at CSU, Chico took CLASS quizzes (n= 8 or 10) throughout the semester in preparation for exams (n=3). CLASS quizzes were released after each content module and students could take the 3-4 relevant quizzes an unlimited number of times before each exam. Students received points for the maximum score of each quiz, which were collectively worth 10% of their course grade. Individual students’ cumulative attempts ranged from 0-72 (mean = 15.1, or approximately 2-3 attempts per quiz). Student calibration scores ranged from 0.2 to 0.60 (where 0 = perfect calibration). Individual mean scores for students’ quiz attempts ranged from 43-100%. Higher number of attempts correlates with higher mean CLASS quiz, exam and final course grades. Students with better calibration scores also had higher CLASS quiz scores. In comparison to a control group of students who did not use CLASS, the semester-long learning gains (Hake, 1998) of CLASS users were higher on Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI) questions that most closely corresponded with course LOs. Continued use of CLASS and analysis of data will address the extent to which CLASS supports learning for students at all performance levels.