Adaptive learning tool helps spur individual success


An online tool helped Siena College's Paul Thurston pinpoint student weaknesses.

Undergraduate professors employ myriad techniques to motivate their students to arrive prepared for active discussion. Despite our efforts, students often fall well short of our preparation expectations and struggle themselves with assessing their own course progress.

This is most problematic in survey or introductory courses that present an entirely new vocabulary of terms, the comprehension of which is critical to student achievement. Fortunately, adaptive learning tools are now available for many higher-education courses that can help professors address this problem.

These tools provide guidance for students by keeping them on an individualized path for success.

Over the past two fall academic semesters, I have incorporated McGraw-Hill’s Connect and emphasized the use of its adaptive learning tool, LearnSmart, in my Organization and Management course.

Through this experience I found that an adaptive learning tool such as LearnSmart, combined with the right emphasis on extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, yields optimal learning outcomes.

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Professor to students: Text away

In fall 2009, I led a sophomore-level class for the first time at Siena College in Loudonville, N.Y. I had mainly taught upper-level and graduate courses and was concerned about my ability to motivate the less mature students.

I decided to incorporate McGraw-Hill’s Connect with Contemporary Management 6e by Jones and George.  My primary goal was to have students attend class prepared to discuss the assigned material, and quickly become able to apply their understanding of basic management concepts through work with community partners and real-life experience.

I was attracted to Connect’s LearnSmart feature that acts as a “virtual tutor” to keep students on track and assess their understanding of and progress with the course material, serving as much more than an intelligent flash-card system.

LearnSmart also has a feature that provides users with instant comparison among students nationwide, adding a self-testing benchmark and level of competitiveness.

I truly felt the students would find the adaptive learning experience intrinsically motivating, and I demonstrated the system on the first day of class with encouragement to have some fun with it.

I urged students to complete the modules, but did not set specific requirements or goals, assuming they would see the adaptive learning tool as an obvious advantage for course preparation and study. I was wrong, but the issue wasn’t with the tool itself.

About 10 percent of the students gave LearnSmart a chance and performed really well, mastering nearly 100 percent of the content in the learning modules. The students who were engaged in the online modules were showing progress—in many cases, participating more and performing better on quizzes and in class projects.

The problem lay in that most students didn’t give the system a try. There was no extrinsic reward for them to do so. At the end of the third week of the semester, I decided that I needed to give the students an incentive for working on the LearnSmart modules.

For more on student engagement in higher education:

Can Twitter use help improve grades? Some researchers think so

Purdue’s student achievement technology goes national

Professor to students: Text away

I assigned five percent of the total course grade to participation in the LearnSmart modules and gave them a specific goal of mastering 25 percent of the content. This change had both desired and undesired consequences. With the extrinsic reward, most students reached the 25 percent completion goal.

Included in this group, however, were several students who had previously been mastering 100 percent of the modules.

I was determined to learn from this “experimental” group of students, because I truly believed in the product. The LearnSmart assessment analytics provide timely and critical information about the students’ progress and comprehension.

The modules are unique in that they ask the student how confident he or she is of the correct answer, and if necessary will intervene to redirect students by unveiling their misperceptions.

The confidence gauge, especially, reveals some compelling patterns—namely, that a large number of people are (frequently) confidently incorrect. I believe this awareness helped my students to become more comfortable applying the course material and remained committed to developing my next syllabus with this pedagogical goal in mind.

I decided that I would assign a difficult and specific goal for mastery of each LearnSmart module and then provide a substantial extrinsic reward for performance leading to that goal.

The next year, during the fall 2010 semester for the same course, I adjusted the requirement for completion of LearnSmart management modules to 100 percent and assigned approximately 24 percent of the total course grade to this component.

Combined with the Connect interactive exercises (12 percent) and quizzes (12 percent), the online portion of the course totaled almost half of the final grade. During class meetings, I was able to focus on the application and integration of concepts, because the students had gained a substantial proficiency with the vocabulary.

The quality of my students’ preparation for interviews with the directors from our community partner, their reflective essays on those interviews, and the planning and execution of their team projects were superior to the previous year.

I attribute a great deal of this increase to the students’ more complete use of LearnSmart and their ability to put into practice the retained concepts I knew they had mastered.

The difference to date has been remarkable.

For more on student engagement in higher education:

Can Twitter use help improve grades? Some researchers think so

Purdue’s student achievement technology goes national

Professor to students: Text away

After a brief learning curve, students adjusted well to this methodology. It was evident they were learning the material because of direct interaction with LearnSmart. Additionally, with full student participation, I was able to see which concepts were causing difficulties for the group as a whole, and I could focus more on these concepts during lecture time as needed.

The extrinsic reward made a difference in getting the students to use LearnSmart, but soon the intrinsic rewards associated with having more control over the learning process, receiving immediate and reliable feedback, and gaining a sense of accomplishment took precedence.

By mid-semester, students willingly shared with me the value they saw in completing the LearnSmart modules.

Each term with LearnSmart’s adaptive learning tool has provided me with an opportunity to adjust my own approach to teaching the field of management. Going forward, I plan to take advantage of the sophisticated analytics available for assessing how students are performing.

Tools such as LearnSmart provide professors with the motivational collateral required and the critical insight needed in an increasingly digital world.

Incorporating adaptive learning tools on a greater scale would undoubtedly aid other educators in preparing students for required mastery of scholarly subjects and beyond.

Paul Thurston Jr., Ph.D., is assistant professor of Marketing and Management at Siena College in Loudonville, New York. He received his doctorate degree in Organizational Studies from the State University of New York at Albany.

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