Comparing student performance on a multi-attempt asynchronous assessment to a single-attempt synchronous assessment in introductory level physics

Abstract

The current paper examines the possibility of replacing conventional synchronous single-attempt exam with more flexible and accessible multi-attempt asynchronous assessments in introductory-level physics by using large isomorphic problem banks. We compared student's performance on both numeric and conceptual problems administered on a multi-attempt, asynchronous quiz to their performance on isomorphic problems administered on a subsequent single-attempt, synchronous exam. We computed the phi coefficient and the McNemar's test statistic for the correlation matrix between paired problems on both assessments as a function of the number of attempts considered on the quiz. We found that for the conceptual problems, a multi-attempt quiz with five allowed attempts could potentially replace similar problems on a single-attempt exam, while there was a much weaker association for the numerical questions beyond two quiz attempts.