It's no surprise that students didn't work at the same time, but it's interesting to discover that some students seemed to have scheduled their individual work (early riser and night owl in table 4). Most individual submissions were concentrated in the afternoon.
Students individual submissions timeTime | early riser (n=11) | night owl (n=10) | overall class mean (n=195) |
morning (06:00-12:00) | 10 | - | 28 |
afternoon (12:00-18:00) | 1 (12:57) | 2 (17:57 - 17:59) | 104 |
evening (18:00-24:00) | - | 5 | 55 |
night (00:00-6:00) | - | 3 | 8 |
As shown in table 5, a lot of submissions were sent on Thursday, the day the course took place. Surprisingly, no submission was sent on Wednesday. This table also shows that individual submissions were more likely to be rejected on Thursday (33%), Monday (30%) and Tuesday (29%).
Individual activities rejection rate by weekdayWeekday | # of rejections | # of submissions | rejection rate |
Monday | 9 | 30 | 30% |
Tuesday | 10 | 35 | 29% |
Wednesday | 0 | 0 | N/A |
Thursday | 24 | 72 | 33% |
Friday | 1 | 18 | 6% |
Saturday | 1 | 16 | 6% |
Sunday | 4 | 24 | 17% |
79% of the students whose first submissions were rejected (sometimes several times) finally successfully validated the task (table 6).
Students' behaviour after an initial rejectionTimes submitted and rejected | Validated | Not validated |
1 time | 12 | 3 |
several times | 7 | 2 |
Two students validated all the individual tasks and two students didn't submit a single one, relying on group tasks only (table 7).
Comparison of students individual completed tasks and course attendancetasks completed | # of students | course attendance average |
13 | 2 | 100% |
12 | 1 | 100% |
11 | 7 | 93% |
10 | 0 | - |
9 | 3 | 78% |
8 | 1 | 44% |
7 | 3 | 93% |
6 | 0 | - |
5 | 1 | 100% |
4 | 1 | 100% |
3 | 1 | 6% |
2 | 0 | - |
1 | 1 | 11% |
0 | 2 | 89% |
Analysis
Students gave priority to those who lead to a bonus. Table 2 shows that they didn't seem to choose the tasks based on their weight: 5 out of the 7 most submitted tasks were only worth 1 point. Likewise, the difficulty of the task didn't seem to be the students' main criteria: the top 3 rejected activities are the same as the top 3 submitted activities. It looks like gamification worked.
Students had various behaviours regarding when to submit a task (tables 3 & 4). It seems that many of them took advantage of DAD and did their "homework" when it was convenient to them. DAD's goal seems to be reached. It is worth mentioning that after the presentation of the tool during the first lesson (week 1), students asked for a second explanation on week 2. This is probably the reason why no task was submitted during the 2 first weeks. Additionally, we can imagine that students didn't feel the urge of completing the tasks at the very beginning of the semester...
It's interesting to mention that few submissions came at the end of the semester (only 2% during week 9). As the end of the semester is usually full of assessments in all the courses students attend, it could mean that students planned to make the activities earlier in the semester in order to lighten the burden of the end of the semester. But we can't test that yet.
This year's formula enabled students to pass the course by completing tasks in DAD, possibly without attending the course. But the opposite happened: students who didn't attend the course regularly finished with a lower score in DAD than students who didn't miss any lecture. It's interesting to notice that the 2 students who didn't submit any individual activity attended the course regularly. These students wre probablyb not comfortable with the dashboard and/or dynamic assessment. Even if there is no correlation between the use of DAD and the course attendance, table 7 shows that students who completed almost all individual tasks have an high course attendance rate. It shows at least that giving students the control doesn't have a bad influence on the course attendance.
Giving students the right to fail and submit again seems to work as 4 out of 5 students who initially failed finally succeeded (table 6). It's also nice to see that most students were not discouraged by their inital failure: only 3 of them (12.5%) gave up at that point.