Learning Experiments Using AB Testing at Scale

Abstract

We report the one of the first applications of treatment/control group learning experiments in MOOCs. We have compared the efficacy of deliberate practice-practicing a key procedure repetitively-with traditional practice on "whole problems". Evaluating the learning using traditional whole problems we find that traditional practice outperforms drag and drop, which in turn outperforms multiple choice. In addition, we measured the amount of learning that occurs during a pretest administered in a MOOC environment that transfers to the same question if placed on the posttest. We place a limit on the amount of such transfer, which suggests that this type of learning effect is very weak compared to the learning observed throughout the entire course.