The effects of spaced repetition in online education

Abstract

Over the course of the past year, I have designed and implemented a tool to simulate spaced repetition in Massively Open Online Courses hosted on edX. I created the tool using edX's course building block, the XBlock, and then ran an experiment in three courses to evaluate its effectiveness. My research was set up as an A/B experiment with a 50% split between the experimental and control groups. After running in two of the courses for approximately one month each and the third course for six months, 32 unique users interacted with the tool. Out of the learners who used the tool, there was a slight increase in their average grade compared to those that did not use it.