Summary of Dissertation Project Development and evaluation of automated feedback-loops in online tasks for chemistry

Abstract:

Transition from upper secondary school to university is challenging for students in various ways. Diverse educational backgrounds lead to heterogeneity in content knowledge among freshmen. So, identifying and filling knowledge gaps become most important to study successfully. Freshmen have to get in touch with other first-year students as well as university professors and ask for help actively to overcome obstacles in learning. This differs from the habits freshmen are used to from school. Integration into academic society is a step-by-step process which may lack social resources at the beginning. Plus, to get feedback on problems, these problems need to be identified and verbalized independently, which both presupposes an adequate amount of content knowledge. Since every second student is about to quit the study program in STEM-subjects, many students cannot master these new demands sufficiently. Research has shown that gaps in content knowledge between high and low achieving students are not compensated by chemistry courses during the first term, which means that break-off becomes more likely. Since feedback is estimated as highly efficient factor to influence learning and motivational processes and feedback opportunities tend to be rare especially for low performing students a treatment was needed to meet that demand. To provide feedback related to the individual mistakes students make while proceeding in learning tasks, digital learning tasks were programmed to give both room for and guidance in case of mistakes. As preceding studies were not able to clarify the exact impact content knowledge on the efficacy of elaborated feedback components on learning processes, two feedback-algorithms had been compared in this study in a pre-post-intervention-group design (University of Duisburg-Essen, winter semester 2019, 2020, 2021; N = 122). The members of one group, who received exactly the same tasks, received error-related tutoring feedback in addition to the corrective feedback that the other group received exclusively. As it can be seen on a control cohort (winter semester 2017; N = 105), there is a significant difference in performance at the end of the first semester between students who had a basic course in chemistry at upper secondary school and those who had an advanced course. For students who had an advanced course at upper secondary school the feedback type made no statistically difference concerning content knowledge at the end of the semester. Students who had a basic course in chemistry at upper secondary school and learned with error specific tutoring feedback were able to catch up to students who had an advanced course in content knowledge whilst those students without an advanced course who learned with corrective feedback stayed behind.  

https://doi.org/10.30819/5859

ISBN 978-3-8325-5859-8

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