Does the Availability of Reattempts and Video Solutions Affect Learners' Voluntary Engagement with Mastery Learning Activities?

Designing interactive virtual learning environments with effective and engaging design elements is crucial in enhancing learners' motivation, engagement, and learning outcomes. By prioritizing a positive user experience that curates cognitive load, interactions within virtual learning environments may effectively promote voluntary and formative engagement. This analysis focuses on investigating the affordances of having an opportunity to immediately reattempt an incorrectly answered question and additionally have access to video solutions on students' voluntary engagement with mastery learning activities. These mastery learning activities were provided in the form of quizzes through a virtual learning environment, YANTRA EDU. This application was developed to facilitate mastery learning, where learners have the opportunity to engage with the sequential practice of various concepts in an introductory programming (CS1) course. The paper describes the design of YANTRA EDU and presents a comparative study of two design conditions, examining the variations in student interactions between the two conditions. The study is based on the availability of reattempts and video-based scaffolding as key differentiating factors in the two conditions. In the first condition (NoRV), the questions did not have an immediate reattempt option if an answer was incorrect. It also did not have any video-based solution available to the students. In the second condition (YesRV), students were provided with one reattempt opportunity if an answer was incorrect. And if the second reattempt response was incorrect, they were provided a video that included a step-by-step explanation of the question's correct approach and solution. In both conditions, the questions would randomly repeat after all the unique questions were attempted to provide continuous practice. We analyze and compare students' aggregate voluntary usage of the practice quizzes between the two conditions. We find that although there were no statistically significant differences in the number of attempted questions and the number of questions correctly answered in the two conditions, students exhibited statistically significant higher accuracy rates with the NoRV condition, where they did not have the option to reattempt or receive video solutions. These results contribute to the understanding of how different interaction design components may influence learners' voluntary engagement within virtual learning environments.