Abstract
Courseware as an adaptive instructional system is a complex environment to develop. The student will encounter lessons of content with integrated formative practice, adaptive activities, and assessments in their learning path. The alignment of all course features, including the scaffolding structure of the adaptive activities, may vary between courses and the teams who created them. In a previous analysis of adaptive activities [1], these activities had net positive effects on student learning estimates and summative assessment scores. In this paper, we will analyze three additional non-STEM courses that had less effective adaptive activities using the same methods as the original study, and further investigate course features that could be influencing their effectiveness, such as alignment, difficulty, and amount of practice. The results of this analysis can provide guidance on how to best create content for adaptive courseware and provide an example of the critical role data analysis has in the evaluation and iterative improvement of student learning environments.
