Validating the pre/post-test in a MOOC environment
Name
PERC15_Chudzicki.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.54 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
29deb93087505b044e6afbf524d98925
Author(s)
Chudzicki, Christopher
Chen, Zhongzhou
Zhou, Qian
Alexandron, Giora
Pritchard, David E.
Date Issued
December 2015
Publisher
American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT)
Citation
Chudzicki, Christopher, Chen, Zhongzhou, Zhou, Qian, Alexandron, Giora and Pritchard, David E. 2015. "Validating the pre/post-test in a MOOC environment."
Version
Final published version
Abstract
A standard method for measuring learning is to administer the same assessment before and after instruction. This pre/post-test technique is widely used in education research and has been used in our introductory physics MOOC to measure learning. One potential weakness of this paradigm is that post-test performance gains may result from exposure on the pre-test instead of instruction. This possibility is exacerbated in MOOCs where students receive multiple attempts per item, instant correct/incorrect feedback, and unlimited time (until the due date). To find the size of this problem in our recent MOOCs, we split the student population into two groups, each of which received identical post-tests but different subsets of post-test items on their group pre-test. We report a small overall advantage (2.9% ± 1.7%) on post-test items due to pre-test exposure. However, this advantage is not robust and is strongly diminished when one obviously anomalous item is removed.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2015.pr.016
