Are Online Study Questions Beneficial?

Abstract

Brothen and Wambach (2001) found that under certain conditions students do not benefit from online resources. They awarded points toward the course grade for high performance on small sets of practice questions and concluded student strategies in completing these quizzes were not beneficial to course performance. We investigated student use of online questions when students received no credit for answering practice questions and found students who made voluntary use of online questions scored higher on course examinations. In contrast to situations in which students complete assigned tasks for credit, students who respond to questions as a voluntary study tactic may use question feedback quite differently and make decisions about how many questions to review using different criteria.

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