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

Physics Education 2024-07-23 v1

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.15257,
  title  = {Comparing student performance on a multi-attempt asynchronous assessment to a single-attempt synchronous assessment in introductory level physics},
  author = {Emily Frederick and Zhongzhou Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.15257},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:48:54.925Z