Zoom in on Oregon State University: How Achieve for Calculus supports student academic performance

[LibbyPhillips]

Download the whitepaper!

Oregon State University is a public four-year college serving over 26,000 undergraduate students. The instructor who partnered with us on this study, Sara Clark, taught 39 students in a face-to-face formatted instruction. The instructor used Achieve throughout the Fall 2021 semester. During this study the instructor assigned homework assignments and post-lecture summative assessments.

The instructor reported that students were engaged in their class and students also reported they found Achieve engaging.

• 100% reported being engaged in the course this semester.
• 79% reported being actively engaged in classroom discussions.
• 95% reported engaging in active learning in the course this semester.

Both the instructor and the students found Achieve easy to use: 84% reported they were comfortable using Achieve. 

Furthermore, Achieve supports student comprehension of classroom material. The instructor reported that the tools within Achieve helped them understand where their students had gaps in their knowledge and also enhanced their pedagogical framework. 79% of students reported that Achieve was effective in supporting their learning over the semester.

“The best part was the chance to answer questions multiple times if you got them wrong with the extra chances feature. It encouraged me to reexamine how I answered a question, and look further into the process of how I solved it to seek out mistakes.” —Oregon State Student

Student engagement in Achieve appears to be related to student academic achievement. Although the relationship between how many activities students finished within Achieve (as a percentage of how many were assigned in the course) and their final grade in the course was not statistically significant, we can see that those students who are completing more Achieve activities do have higher grades on average.

For more details on this study, as well as an additional study on another OSU calculus class, take a look at the white papers below! This series will continue with an in-depth look at the precalculus and calculus classes at more of the schools that participated in this study.