‘Forced to think’—an analysis of how students benefit from online warm-up exercises with feedback

Abstract

Active learning yields better learning outcomes than traditional, lecture-based teaching. Common approaches in large lecture courses are activating elements during the lectures and warm-up activities using online learning environments. However, implementing warm-up exercises, on which students work on by themselves makes formative feedback increasingly important. We have studied students’ views on warm-up online exercises, focusing on the role of automated feedback. We compared two types of feedback: feedback which guided the student towards the correct answer and feedback that guided the student towards the correct reading materials. We have also examined the correlation between students’ views on the exercises and learning outcomes, as measured by exercise and exam points. The exercises were administered with a Moodle-based system focusing on teaching and assessment using a computer-based algebra kernel. The study was conducted during the first introductory mechanics course in physics at the University of Helsinki. We concluded that the preferred type of feedback was dependent on the student, i.e. different students prefer different kinds of feedback. Importantly, the students who completed the exercises alone reported benefiting more from them, which shows that the warm-up exercises successfully extended support for students outside of classroom hours.