ManyClasses 1: Assessing the generalizable effect of immediate versus delayed feedback across many college classes Article Swipe
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· 2019
· Open Access
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· DOI: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/4mvyh
· OA: W4252512581
Psychology researchers have long attempted to identify educational practices that improve student learning. However, experimental research on these practices is often conducted in laboratory contexts or in a single course, threatening the external validity of the results. In this paper, we establish an experimental paradigm for evaluating the benefits of recommended practices across a variety of authentic educational contexts – a model we call ManyClasses. The core feature is that researchers examine the same research question and measure the same experimental effect across many classes spanning a range of topics, institutions, teacher implementations, and student populations. We report the first ManyClasses study, which examined how the timing of feedback on class assignments, either immediate or delayed by a few days, affected subsequent performance on class assessments. Across 38 classes, the overall estimate for the effect of feedback timing was 0.002 (95% HDI -0.05 to 0.05), indicating that there was no effect of immediate versus delayed feedback on student learning that generalizes across classes. Further, there were no credibly non-zero effects for 40 pre-registered moderators related to class-level and student-level characteristics. Yet, our results provide hints that in certain kinds of classes, which were under-sampled in the current study, there may be modest advantages for delayed feedback. More broadly, these findings provide insights regarding the feasibility of conducting within-class randomized experiments across a range of naturally occurring learning environments.
