What You Do Predicts How You Do: Prospectively Modeling Student Quiz Performance Using Activity Features in an Online Learning Environment

Students using online learning environments need to effectively self-regulate their learning. However, with an absence of teacher-provided structure, students often resort to less effective, passive learning strategies versus constructive ones. We consider the potential benefits of interventions that promote retrieval practice – retrieving learned content from memory – which is an effective strategy for learning and retention. The goal is to nudge students towards completing short, formative quizzes when they are likely to succeed on those assessments. Towards this goal, we developed a machine-learning model using data from 32,685 students who used an online mathematics platform over an entire school year to prospectively predict scores on three-item assessments (N = 210,020) from interaction patterns up to 9 minutes before the assessment as well as Item Response Theory (IRT) estimates of student ability and quiz difficulty. These models achieved a student-independent correlation of 0.55 between predicted and actual scores on the assessments and outperformed IRT-only predictions (r = 0.34). Model performance was largely independent of the length of the analyzed window preceding a quiz. We discuss potential for future applications of the models to trigger dynamic interventions that aim to encourage students to engage with formative assessments rather than more passive learning strategies.