Recent education research results at Codon Learning
One of the biggest challenges as an educator is the difficulty of supporting students with a wide range of incoming preparation. Many instructors also report that over the last five years, students are coming to college less prepared.
How do we help students with less extensive STEM backgrounds catch up, while also ensuring that all students develop the expertise needed to solve today’s STEM problems?
Recent data courtesy of Jenny Knight at the University of Colorado Boulder suggest that Codon Learning’s Study Path helps solve the prior preparation problem. In Dr. Knight’s course, less-prepared students who use the Study Path extensively are just as likely to pass the course as highly-prepared students.
Put another way, nearly 1 in 5 students coming in with less preparation are expected to fail the course, but if they use the Study Path, they don’t.
Students were binned into four quartiles of prior preparation based on their scores on a Week 1 pre-test (the Genetics Concept Assessment, Smith, Wood & Knight 2008 CBE-Life Sciences Education). High Study Path use indicates greater than 75% completion over the term. N = 249 students (154 low Study Path use, 95 high Study Path use) in an introductory Genetics course at a large R1 university.
Codon's Study Path was designed from scratch to apply the evidence from the learning sciences literature to support metacognition, self-testing, and spaced learning. Self-testing and spaced learning, in particular, have been shown time and again to significantly boost student performance (Roedinger & Pyc 2012, Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition; Dunlosky et al. 2013 Psychological Science in the Public Interest) and even promote equity in learning outcomes (Rodriguez et al. 2018, PLOS ONE).
Importantly, the Study Path benefits all students. Across all four quartiles, students who used the Study Path heavily earned higher grades than their peers who did not. So while the most prepared students may be equally likely to pass whether or not they use the Study Path, if their goal is to earn an A, the Study Path will benefit them.
While these data are from one course at one institution, we are currently expanding our research program to other institutions to learn about the Study Path’s ability to reduce inequities across many student populations.
If you would like to learn more or possibly participate in the study, please contact us at ben@codonlearning.com.
04.21.2024