Alejandra’s Story

Alejandra’s course is compulsory for all first-year students of Business, Economics and Social Science and Philosophy, Political Science, Economics and Sociology. With around 350 students in each cohort, Alejandra was very aware of the broad range of interest across her students, some of whom have never taken a statistics core.

Incentivisation

Following an initial period of assigning SmartBook readings to the class, Alejandra ‘flipped the classroom’ with a structured programme of activities in Connect to prepare students ahead of class as well as to consolidate learning after class.

Class time is then dedicated to active learning, working through problems in small groups, with Alejandra and TAs floating between groups to answer questions, interact and observe common challenges that can then be addressed.

Completion of the assignments is highly incentivised to ensure that the model works effectively. 40% of the final mark is done via continuous assessment.

Increased engagement

So if they do the work, they pass the course. Alejandra saw high engagement with the pre-reading from 95% of students engaging with it in her first year, and 100% engaging with it in her second. In terms of completion of the pre-reading, it went from 77% in the first year to 92% in the second.

The average mark for the quizzes went from 54% in the first year to 67% in the second, and that increase was even more of an achievement as Alejandra adapted the quiz in the second year to be more difficult. Alejandra finds there to be a strong correlation between the quizzes and final student mark.

Average mark for weekly quizzes