In this experimental study, we examined the effects of practice tests and feedback on performance and completion in a five-module massive open online course (MOOC). Participants (N = 6100) were adults enrolled in the American Museum of Natural History's (AMNH) climate change MOOC. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions. After completing each module, learners in the first treatment group took practice tests without receiving feedback. Learners in the second treatment group took practice tests and received basic (correct/incorrect) feedback. Learners in the third treatment group took practice tests and received detailed feedback. The control group did not take practice tests and, hence, received no feedback. Post-tests were administered after each module. Results indicated that: (1) among all learners in this MOOC, students in the practice test/basic feedback and practice test/detailed feedback conditions outperformed their counterparts in the control and practice test/no feedback conditions; (2) there were no differences in persistence and completion among conditions; (3) conscientiousness was the only predictor of course persistence and completion. These findings offer a new contribution to the assessment and feedback literature and can help to improve self-paced online science courses.

Discordance in perception of disease activity between adolescent patients with lupus and their providers may influence disease outcomes. We found that patients endorsed higher perceptions of disease activity than providers. Discordance was present at all levels of disease activity, particularly in patients with high activity, nephritis, and/or taking corticosteroids or mycophenolate mofetil.

Teachers across educational systems struggle to find time to provide quality feedback to their students. Asking students to create their own feedback has been shown to enhance students' performance. In this experimental study, we explored the effects of rubrics and exemplars on writing performance, encouraging students to employ these tools for self-feedback generation. Two hundred six 9th- and 10th-grade students participated. Students were asked to write an essay and revise it based on the information provided to them under four conditions: control, rubrics, exemplars, and combined condition (rubrics and exemplars). After submitting the revised version of their essay, students in experimental conditions were trained on how to use rubrics and/or exemplars. Students were then asked to write another essay and revise it based on the information consistent with their experimental group membership (i.e., control, rubric, exemplars, combined). We found that students in the rubrics condition benefited the most, closely followed by students in the exemplars condition, and then the combined condition. The performance across conditions was somewhat variable for the three performance outcomes. Furthermore, the improvement in the usage of the tools following the training session was the highest for the exemplars condition. We conclude that teachers can encourage students to use both rubrics and exemplars to generate self-feedback and improve performance. This way, teachers' workload can be significantly decreased. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Interactions between players and designers during IDN authoring are an undervalued source of information about the authoring process. This paper analyzes a corpus of player-author interactions from an online workshop. We classified feedback types and IDN design features, showing player reflections during authoring influenced the peer designer’s work. Some types of feedback correlated positively with the overall growth of a design partner’s IDN, while other feedback types correlated with story content. When players suggested authoring techniques or other subjective experiences playing through the emerging IDN, their partner’s designs expanded structurally (nodes and branches). When players shared negative evaluations, the partner’s design did not grow. In comparison, player reflections that were cognitively oriented led to increases in story settings, while player affective expressions led to more character dialogue. Effects include increases in both IDN narrative elements and structure. Some effects correlate with participant gender and native language, although not with race/ethnicity. The study results offer insights about intersubjectivity - what is on novice player-designers’ minds as they wrestle with interactive digital narrative authoring. IDN pedagogy can, thus, benefit from designer-player collaboration as students experiment with technical authoring tools, develop and employ relevant vocabulary, and interpret a player’s feedback. Additionally, the Authoring-Other Exchange System employed in this study provides a framework and novel measures for future research and pedagogy.