This blog is about a self reflective experience I had in an economics module in which the lecturer employed the use of learning analytics to follow how students studied by tracking if they did the in-class quiz and how well they performed. The part that makes my experience intriguing to reflect upon it is not being part of the treatment group; as long as one group of students must do a quiz in class in order to unlock reading material (lectures, tutorial questions, slides of lectures, etc) the other group could do so whenever they wanted and not at all.

What surprised me most about this experiment is that I wasn't even aware that I was participating in a study until near the end of the semester when the researcher informed us of it before the final exam and requested our input. This indicates that I had finished the module without realizing that I had been participating in a comparison between the two, which suggests something about my behavior when given complete freedom.

Feelings

Reflecting on this, I am not at all uncomfortable with the fact that my professor might have been keeping track of my progress. In fact, I think it is quite uplifting that a teacher would be so dedicated to measuring every possible interaction between students and the content. If any monitoring of student behaviors helps a teacher realize trends and make better choices about their future students, then the use of data is definitely worthwhile and conscientious. Student learning truly improves when instructors are able to look past test scores and see the true tempo of student learning or lack thereof.

Having said that, I am also conscious of the fact that the nudges and reminders that the treatment group got were exactly the sort of thing I didn't have-and without them I acted exactly as you'd expect. I worked at my own pace for the quizzes, which meant that I sometimes didn't work at all and sometimes did them quite late if at all. It felt comfortable at the time, but it wasn't the sort of freedom that learning needs.

Evaluation: 

What worked well

What I got most value from were the tutorial questions, as well as the tutorial discussion sessions. The tutorial questions in particular were good, because they were very similar to the way in which the written exam questions were presented. Doing them really put my finger on what the professor was expecting from us - not only thematically, but also in presenting an economic argument and easily approaching a problem-solving question.

It was easy to see that the course was designed in a logical fashion: if the tutorial questions prepared us for the exam's written and problem-solving parts, the weekly quizzes help us preparing for the MCQ part by telling us whether we actually understand the theoretical core of each subject. Both of them had different roles, and overall gave me a reasonably complete picture of what getting ready for an exam consisted in.

The in-class discussions and tutorial classes were invaluable to me. The intimacy of the tutorial class set-up, as opposed to a giant lecture hall, provided a real opportunity for questions and answers with the professor. I was able to ask my own questions and pose my own hypothetical scenarios: trying to learn not just the answer, but why each answer was correct.

Challenges

The overwhelming annoyance with weekly quizzes was not a design issue but a platform issue: as I answered questions, I was not told straight away if my answer was right or wrong. This became one of the most valuable aspects of doing quizzes –quick feedback. It was taken away from me, meaning I completed quizzes without necessarily learning where I had gone wrong or what I needed to learn again.

In terms of the Question of the Week and conditional quiz access - neither of these was relevant to me personally due to my being in the control group. I cannot make a rational assessment of the efficacy of either, but I do have some reasons why my behavior may have been affected as a result, which I will examine below.

Analysis

The Question of the Week

As I did not belong to the Treatment group, I did not experience Question of the Week polling well enough to determine whether it affected my economic thinking. However, I can now see what the Question of the Week was trying to do - and I now realize I have lost something from not participating in them more fully. Prompts that ask you to apply an economic concept to an actual situation are a different type of practice than defining the concept. They require you to use the concept rather than know the concept, which is a note-worthy distinction in economics, and one I think will improve a great deal from better use of Question of the Week.

Conditional Quizzes and Engagement

This was, undoubtedly, the most revelatory aspect of my experience. The conditional nature of the quiz; completing the quiz allowed students to gain access to learning materials. But, I did not experience that. I did the quizzes when I chose to (or needed to) and in no way was it at the appropriate time.

This is my experience: more than once during the semester, I would do a quiz, and I would realize when I had finished just how much I "did not get." Puzzled, I would turn back and re-examine certain troubling point, stopping to read in fewer words and more carefully. That happened because I actively chose to give myself that experience. It cannot happen otherwise, and with conditional access students like myself will simply not have the ability to face that challenge.

Over time, I believe, I would have more often responded truthfully; with more self-awareness I'm sure that I would have been more willing to do so.

Feedback and Motivation

Good feedback for me was the moment that happened after midterm when the instructor came to the class to do a live review of the quizzes and exams. She went through the common errors students committed, identified weak topics, and asked questions directly to the class about whether they had done the online quizzes and had done the tutorial problems. That silent confrontation was very effective for me.

When she asked, I suddenly knew exactly which quizzes I had not done or left half finished. I didn't feel panic - I felt a very specific form of guilt that can actually be quite motivating. In the following days I went back and did the quizzes I had missed, which I wouldn't say was the most expedient solution, but it was precisely those accountability that a public moment of assessment provided that motivated me to do what reminders in private wouldn't have.

Conclusion

This module has reaffirmed a suspicion I probably already held but have been reluctant to admit: as a learner, I thrive within external structure, and I am prone to undue optimism about my capabilities when faced with relative autonomy. At several points throughout this module, I found myself feeling certain about a subject and then, only once I sat down to do a quiz, realizing I had missed some nuances. That progression confidence, quiz, humility, and review can be very helpful, but it

assumes I will always take the quiz in the middle. I suppose, I learned too that freewill, in an academic context, may not be exactly what it feels like. Not being compelled to do something isn't necessarily equivalent with having the drive to do something and for a student like me, those two things are not synonymous.

On a more encouraging note, I did cultivate a true habit of pre-reading before tutorials and lectures. Instead of sitting in my chair during a lecture and facing an entire surface of information for the first time, I began to skim through the material before hand so that the lecture became more of an opportunity for reinforcement and clarification than the first encounter. It was visibly easier to follow and helped me to avoid the feeling of rushing to keep up.

Action Plan

The piece of advice I most need to implement is "to be disciplined in my use of time." I seem to have a tendency to procrastinate on everything until the last hour or so before an assignment or test, and then get everything done at once. While this approach is efficient – I always pass – I find it stress-inducing, and producing sketchy knowledge that is bound to fade away fast, and not how I want to operate as a student.

From now on, I intend to place organized reminders on my tablet-similar to those the treatment group was subject to-that remind me to review each week's related content a few days after it has been learned, as opposed to a few weeks down the line. I will view quiz's and review activities as required appointments as opposed to optional add ons to be completed when cool.

I also want to impose on myself this same concept of conditional auto-access: to say if I have not done the week's readings and tried the problems, I won't move on to a new concept. This structure that was incorporated into the other group's lives is one that must be brought into my own. I now know what it is like on the other side when I am left to formulate my own.