UWM online psych students outperform those in lecture hall cl...

Most sections of Psychology 101 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee fit the popular image of a college class: Hundreds of students pack into a lecture hall twice a week and attend regular discussion sections.

With four 100-point exams making up most of the grade, it is the kind of course an academically weak student might struggle to pass.

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Professor Diane Reddy has replaced the traditional lecture format with an online version of Psych 101. Students learn at their own pace but also have to obtain mastery, demonstrated by passing a quiz on each unit, before they can move on to the next.

Along the way, students get help from teaching assistants who monitor their online activity, identifying weak spots and providing advice - even if the students don't seek it.

Initial evidence says it works: In a study of 5,000 students over two years, U-Pace students performed 12% better on the same cumulative test than students who took traditional Psych 101 with the same textbook and course content, even though U-Pace students had lower average grades than those in the conventional course.

The online model, the study found, was particularly successful for disadvantaged or underprepared students - low-income students, racial and ethnic minorities, and those with low grades or ACT scores. And students in general do better in the class, too, earning a higher percentage of As and Bs than students earn in traditional Psych 101.

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Like the traditional class, U-Pace requires that students read the material and take quizzes. But Reddy's course is self-paced. While the syllabus recommends students read at least a chapter and complete two online quizzes each week, students can do the work whenever they want before the end of the semester.

That's different from even a typical online class, where students complete readings on a set schedule.

Reddy's students read a half-chapter, then go through a series of online review games that test their knowledge on key terms. Students must access each of these activities before they can open a quiz on the material - in a way, it forces them to study.

Students then get six minutes to complete a 10-question quiz. A typical question describes a scenario and asks the student to choose which theory or concept it represents.

Here's where U-Pace diverges most clearly from the typical lecture or even online course: To advance to the next section, students have to score a 90% on the quiz. If they fail, the system makes them wait an hour before retaking it - in theory, giving them time to review.

When they open up the quiz to take it again, the concepts are the same but the questions have changed, drawing from a bank of thousands of questions that Reddy created.

There's another twist: The students can retake the quizzes as many times as they need to pass. If the students get to Quiz 23 of the course's total of 24, they get an A in the class, without ever having taken a typical 100-point supervised exam.

It is part of a scale: If they get to Quiz 20, they get a B; Quiz 17, a C; and so on. A student who passes all the quizzes the first time around gets the same grade as a student who has to take each quiz eight times before passing.

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