The impact of adaptive activities in Acrobatiq courseware: investigating the efficacy of formative adaptive activities on learning estimates and summative assessment scores

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explain the learning methodologies behind the adaptive activities within Acrobatiq’s courseware, and to investigate the impact of these adaptive activities on learning estimates and summative assessment scores using real course data. The adaptive activities used for this analysis were part of a Probability and Statistics course, which was delivered to college students at a public four-year institution as part of an educational grant. The data were analyzed to identify if the adaptive activities had an impact on learning estimates as well as on summative assessment scores. Results showed that the adaptive activities had a net positive effect on learning estimates. Results also showed that not only did learning estimate states correlate to mean summative assessment scores, but improving learning estimates after completing the adaptive activity practice yielded higher mean summative assessment scores. The implications of this analysis and future research are discussed.