Recalibrating Student Learning in Introductory Geoscience Courses Through the Use of a Web-Based Assessment Tool

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This project will examine the impact of a web-based system called Confidence-based Learning Accuracy Support System (CLASS) on student learning at two campuses, a research university and a two-year college. The CLASS tool offers an opportunity to improve student learning outcomes and performance in undergraduate geoscience courses. For the student, CLASS has the appearance of an online quizzing program in which students also estimate their confidence in the accuracy of each of their answers. CLASS calculates the gap between the student's performance and their confidence in their answers. This tool gives students valuable and instantaneous feedback on both their level of knowledge and the accuracy of their perceptions about their knowledge. For the instructor, CLASS provides numerical and graphical summaries of students' performance and confidence regarding specific course content areas. CLASS can be used at the beginning of a course to provide instructors with information about the content areas in which students are overconfident or under-confident. Such information cannot be ascertained from traditional assessment methods. Instructors can use this information to redesign lessons that target problematic content, as well as to provide supplementary instruction or specific learning interventions. The impact of this newly developed tool will be evaluated and results of the research will help inform our understanding of student learning. If this tool is shown to positively impact learning and instruction, it could be used to improve learning for any subject or course. The Confidence-based Learning Accuracy Support System (CLASS) was developed as a web-based tool that is grounded in the findings of educational psychology research and a self-regulated learning theoretical framework. It has benefits for both students and instructors. This project will iteratively pair conscientious course design and direct metacognitive instruction to investigate CLASS's potential to serve as a tool for increasing student metacognitive monitoring accuracy, self-regulation, and performance in undergraduate geoscience courses. The project will apply the tool at both a two-year college and a research institution. Additionally, the implementation of CLASS will be analyzed as a novel metric for assessing relative effectiveness of instructional strategies in eliciting student learning gains and monitoring accuracy in the target courses. The overarching goal of the project is to increase student performance in introductory geoscience courses across diverse populations via the implementation of a web-based assessment tool (CLASS) that integrates student performance and confidence measures. The following project objectives will be implemented: 1. Characterize how the use of the CLASS tool influences student performance in introductory geology courses through a sequential program of interventions informed by student data collected from CLASS quizzes and student interviews and surveys; 2. Compare and contrast the use of the CLASS tool in face-to-face and online classes to determine the relative impact across different educational settings, especially given the increasing prevalence of formal cyber-learning environments; 3. Determine the relative use and impact of the CLASS tool in different types of institutions by comparing course data on student performance and metacognition before and after deployment in similar classes at both a research intensive four-year university and a two-year college; 4. Develop a suite of customizable CLASS quizzes to share with the geoscience community that are linked to learning objectives relevant to content typically discussed in introductory geology courses; and 5. Disseminate the CLASS resource through an open access website including a tutorial series so that it can be utilized by other faculty, regardless of discipline, who seek to create their own materials to support student learning.