AC 2011-736: IMPROVED STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT IN MATERIAL AND ENERGY BALANCES USING PERSONALIZED ONLINE HOME- WORK

Personalized, online homework was used to supplement textbook homework, quizzes, and exams for one section of a course in material and energy balances. The use of online homework during the Spring 2010 semester is summarized here and detailed by Liberatore in , and additional results from Spring 2011 will be included in the presentation. The objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that students using personalized, online homework earned better grades in the course. The online homework system asks the same questions of each student while changing one or more numeric values in the problem statement. A comparison of performance on common quizzes, exams, and final course grades between students using the textbook and online homeworks versus students completing textbook homework and simple, multiple choice reading quizzes showed a statistically significant increase in achievement for the students using online homework. Of note, 91% of the students using online homework achieved C or better as their final course grade compared with 72% of the students in the control group. Student evaluations show that 66% of the students prefer textbook homework in combination with online homework to maximize learning of the course material.