Evaluating the Effectiveness of Digital Formative Learning Assessments in University Large-scale Lectures

Large-scale lectures at universities with an highly uneven lecturer-student proportion are still common default (Leidenfrost et al. 2009), and do serve as the primary form of delivering learning content in various phases of university programs. This situation often relates to budget restrictions and the convenience to ‘interact’ with a large number of learners. However, these large-scale lectures are typically characterized by high anonymity and suffer from a lack of interaction and feedback (Grießhaber 1994). Due to the nature of these lectures, the way of transmission is rather unidirectional, resulting in insufficient learning outcomes, unsatisfied students and a high number of absent students. From a student’s perspective, motivational aspects often relate to this problem and therefore universities are faced with the challenge to specifically increase the motivation of students to actively participate in such lectures and also self-regulate their own learning process. From a lecturer perspective, this situation is also unsatisfying, since it often relates to poor evaluations and attendance rates. Additionally, these measures are often used as a proxy for didactical quality of a lecture. The solution for these outlined problems are either turning away from this lecture format, which is typically not possible, or optimizing current lecture formats to face these issues. In this context, digital solutions like formative assessments are possible solutions for the optimization of large-scale lectures. Such solutions are highly scalable, provide tailored feedback to students, and therefore can contribute to the students motivation, their learning processes and outcomes. However, little is known about their detailed effects and how they relate in different learning contexts to the learning process and different learning outcomes.
Based on the identified research gaps and the above formulated research goals, we derive following over-arching research question that serves as the basis for our project proposal:
How does a digital formative learning assessment in large-scale lectures contribute to students’ learning processes and how does it influence student learning outcomes?
To answer this question, we derive a model for explaining and predicting learning processes, learning outcomes and the influence of contextual as well as inter-learner differences when deploying digital formative learning assessments in large-scale lectures. For this purpose, we carry out three intervention studies in multiple large-scale lectures at the University of St.Gallen and Kassel to derive a multitude of insights that relate on the one hand to the development and refinement of a theoretical model. Based on this expected contribution of our research project, we derive the following research goals:
1) Development of a model that explains and predicts how digital formative assessments contributes to the quality of student motivation, students’ learning processes and how it influences student learning outcomes.
2) Detailed empirical investigation of the effects of a digital formative assessment in several university large-scale lectures by means of a primarily quantitative research approach within different intervention studies.
The expected results of the proposed research project have a high relevance for research and practice. We contribute to the body of knowledge in relevant and highly interdisciplinary research areas, and we plan several publications in renowned scientific conferences as well as highly recognized national and international scientific journals in the fields of information systems and education.