Purposeful Usage of Achieve is Effective

[becky_anderson]

What we have learned with Achieve: it is less about how many assignments, and more about the engagement with the assignments as planned.  

Over four semesters (F19-S20-F20-S21), we worked with 4419 students engaging with more than half a million unique assignments from 149 courses across 6 subjects. We collected a lot of data from those studies (that we are digging into further with more studies in subsequent semesters), and here’s what we have found so far:

What did we see helping student performance for students using Achieve?

• Students using more of their courses’ assignments and having higher grades on those assignments, had higher exam scores.
• Students with higher grades on their assignments (gradebook average) could expect to be 9 points higher on exams.
• Students that use less than the typical student, by course, can expect to perform 4% to 8% lower on their exams, while students that use more than the typical, perform 1.5% higher on their exams.

What did not help student performance?

• Neither the overall number of assignments for each course nor the percent of these assignments that were graded had an impact.
• The  overall number of assignments engaged by the student nor the raw number of graded assignments had an impact.
• Simply adding additional assignments does not appear to help course performance.

In short, it is less about how many assignments, and more about the engagement with the assignments as planned.  

Recommendations for customers:

• Allow and encourage students to engage and persist more, maybe even collaborate.
• Some assignments should be graded and tracked (e.g., check for understanding, formative and benchmark assessment).
• You do not necessarily need to assign more or increase the load on students.