Cognitive, personality and behavioural predictors of academic success in a large undergraduate...

Cognitive, personality and behavioural predictors of academic success in a large undergraduate program. Dr Matthew Dry

University of Adelaide, School of Psychology

Acknowledgements … and a disclaimer ….

• My co-authors are Clemence Due, Anna Chur-Hansen, and Nicholas Burns (all from Adelaide Uni School of Psychology)

• This research has been partly funded by an Office of Learning and Teaching Seed grant

• We have received technical support from McGraw-Hill, but none of the authors are affiliated with the company, and they have not provided any financial support for this research!

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I am a psychologist ….. and an academic …

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• I am interested in human behaviour in general

• As a teacher I’m particularly interested in why some students do well, (and others not so well) and the factors that play a role in this.

Online learning tools

• Come in all sorts of colours and flavours – quizzes, videos, interactive experiments, puzzles, etc

• It is generally claimed (or assumed?) that they aid student learning

• But assessing their actual utility is hard

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Talk Outline

1. The Context

2. The Tool – How LearnSmart works – Initial Findings

3. The Research – The psychological factors influencing academic success – The current study – Results

4. Blackboard data

5. General Discussion, etc

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The Context – Large Undergraduate Psychology Course

• Psychology 1A (Semester 1) N = 700

• Psychology 1B (Semester 2) N = 600

• Each semester covers six core concept areas, e.g. in 1B: – Developmental psychology

– Statistics

– Personality

– Motivation & Emotion

– Learning

– Intelligence

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• Most of the assessment, and all of the course content is hosted on or accessed via BlackBoard

• Assessment tasks: – Online quizzes assessing the six topic areas (MAEs – Module

Assessment Exercises) = 20%

– A research report = 15%

– Research Participation = 10%

– End-of-semester exam = 55%

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• The textbook we use is Passer, M. W. & Smith, R. E. (2013). Psychology – The Science of Mind and Behaviour (Australian Edition). McGraw-Hill: North Ryde, NSW – Most introductory psychology texts cover exactly the same material

– Even the chapters tend to be in the same order

– Like most textbooks it comes with a range of online supplementary materials

– The reason I adopted this textbook was because of the LearnSmart tool

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The Tool - LearnSmart®

• Online quiz covering the textbook chapter content

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• LearnSmart is adapts to the student’s ability level based on – Correct versus incorrect answers – The metacognitive data (I know it/I think so/Unsure/ No idea)

• If students get questions right and are well calibrated the questions get harder

• If students get questions wrong or are poorly calibrated the questions get easier

• It seemed to me that students would be more motivated to perform this task because the degree of challenge would be matched to the student … so I set it as an extension task for students to complete if they wanted or to ignore if they chose…

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• Each of the six course topics is assessed via an online quiz (MAE)

• Students that had completed the LearnSmart task associated with each of these topics prior to the MAE did better than the other students: – This was a statistically significant difference

– It was consistent across topic areas and cohorts

– It amounted to a difference of around 5-15%

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Why would this happen?

• Is it the tool? And what aspects of the tool in particular? – Adaptation?

– Metacognitive aspect (calibration)?

– Immediacy of feedback?

• Is it something to do with the type of student that chose to use the tool? – We know that there are certain psychological variables that affect

academic success …

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The Psychology of Academic Success

• There is a large body of literature investigating the affect of individual differences in psychological variables on academic success: – IQ affects success. Smart students tend to do better than not-so-smart

students.

– Personality affects success:

• Two of the Big 5 personality trait (conscientiousness & openness)

• Epistemic curiosity, need for cognition

• Learning Style

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The chicken or the egg?

• Students that used the tool did better academically, AND

• Smarter/more conscientious students might be more likely to use the tool, BUT

• Smarter/more conscientious students tend do better academically, SO

• It is clear that we need to do some more research before we can decide if the tool is actually having an effect!

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The Current Study

• Does the LearnSmart tool have an impact upon academic success above and beyond what we would expect from these individual differences? – Psychology 1A students (Semester 1)

– Students participated for course credit. N = 278 (194 female)

– Intellectual abilities tasks (Ravens APM, CAB – inductive reasoning)

– Personality measures (Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, Epistemic Curiosity, Need for Cognition)

– Behavioral measure (LearnSmart usage)

– Outcome variable (Exam performance for Semester 1)

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The Current Study

• Does the LearnSmart tool have an impact upon academic success above and beyond what we would expect from these individual differences? – Psychology 1A students (Semester 1)

– Students participated for course credit. N = 278 (194 female)

– Intellectual abilities tasks (Ravens APM, CAB – inductive reasoning)

– Personality measures (Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, Epistemic Curiosity, Need for Cognition)

– Behavioral measure (LearnSmart usage)

– Outcome variable (Exam performance for Semester 1)

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Measuring intellectual ability – Ravens APM

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This one is relatively easy ….

But this one is quite hard!

Measuring Personality Trait – Need For Cognition

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Comparing LearnSmart Users (n = 159) and Non-Users (n = 119)

Measure Cohen’s d p-value

Intellectual Abilities CAB-I 0.07 .54

Ravens APM 0.01 .94

Personality Traits Conscientiousness 0.45 <.001

Epistemic Curiosity 0.42 <.001

Need for Cognition 0.41 <.001

Openness to Experience 0.32 .009

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Users did not differ from Non-users on the intellectual abilities measures: Being clever does not make you more or less likely to use the tool

Comparing LearnSmart Users (n = 159) and Non-Users (n = 119)

Measure Cohen’s d p-value

Intellectual Abilities CAB-I 0.07 .54

Ravens APM 0.01 .94

Personality Traits Conscientiousness 0.45 <.001

Epistemic Curiosity 0.42 <.001

Need for Cognition 0.41 <.001

Openness to Experience 0.32 .009

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Users were more significantly more conscientious and open to experience, and had a higher degree of epistemic curiosity and need for cognition.

Correlation matrix for variables

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1. CAB-I -

2. Ravens APM .50

3. Conscientiousness .06 .03

4. Epistemic Curiosity .03 .03 .38

5. Need for Cognition .11 .15 .44 .66

6. Openness to Experience .13 .12 -.09 .32 .36

7. LearnSmart Usage .07 .03 .20 .14 .16 .12

8. Exam .22 .22 .14 .05 .13 .17 .31

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1. CAB-I -

2. Ravens APM .50






8. Exam .22 .22 .14 .05 .13 .17 .31

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Intellectual ability predicts exam performance


1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1. CAB-I -

2. Ravens APM .50






8. Exam .22 .22 .14 .05 .13 .17 .31

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Intellectual ability predicts exam performance – but not LearnSmart usage


1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1. CAB-I -

2. Ravens APM .50






8. Exam .22 .22 .14 .05 .13 .17 .31

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The personality traits all predict LearnSmart usage


1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1. CAB-I -

2. Ravens APM .50






8. Exam .22 .22 .14 .05 .13 .17 .31

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The personality traits predict exam performance (except epistemic curiosity)


1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1. CAB-I -

2. Ravens APM .50






8. Exam .22 .22 .14 .05 .13 .17 .31

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Importantly – LearnSmart usage predicts exam performance

Predicting Exam Performance - Regression

• We compared two regression models predicting exam results:

• Model 1. – Exam = CAB-I + APM + C + EC + NFC + O

– R2 = .11, F(7, 271) = 5.36, p < .001

• Model 2. – Exam = CAB-I + APM + C + EC + NFC + O + LS

– R2 = .17, F(7, 270) = 8.14, p < .001

• R2 change = .06, F(1, 270) = 22.2, p < .001

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Predicting Exam Performance - Regression

• Relative importance regression indicates that LearnSmart usage accounts for around 46% of the explained variance, intellectual abilities for 32%, and openness to experience around 11%

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% R2

CAB-I 14.2

Ravens APM 17.5

Conscientiousness 7.4

Epistemic Curiosity 1.6

Need for Cognition 2.9

Openness to Experience 10.7

LearnSmart 45.6

Summary – Semester 1 study

• The psychological measures give insight into users vs non-users

• They did not differ in regards to intellectual ability. – Clever students are no more or less likely to make use of the tool than

the other students

• But they did differ in regards to personality. – Users scored higher on Conscientiousness, Epistemic Curiosity, Need for

Cognition and Openness to Experience

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• The psychological measures and LearnSmart usage predicted exam performance

• But LearnSmart usage was the strongest predictor – LearnSmart usage predicted exam performance even when controlling

for individual differences in personality and intellectual ability

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• Does the LearnSmart tool have an impact upon academic success above and beyond what we would expect from these individual differences?

• YES!

• This tool appears to actually have a positive impact upon academic performance!

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Looking Ahead – Semester 2 study

• In Semester 2 we have mandated a minimum usage of the tool for course credit (5%)

• All students are required to complete the tests of cognitive abilities and personality measures as part of the major assignment – They can choose not to give consent for their data to be used for research

purposes (good research is ethical research!)

• We are also collecting a range of other variables that may be informative – Attitudes to learning, predictions of achievement, metacognitive data, etc

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What about Blackboard?

• Psych 1A/B students interface with Blackboard for the majority of the content and assessment

• This is potentially a rich data-source – One of the reasons I’m here is that I want to know more about the type

of data that can be extracted from Blackboard

• To date I have run some simple analyses using data from Blackboard …

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What can Blackboard tell us about academic success?

• There is a significant relationship between submission latency and performance (r = .31, p< .001) … but plenty of students are submitting at the last moment and doing well.

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0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 160

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Submission time prior to due-date (Days)

MA

E %


• The same pattern holds for the subset of students that we have the psychological data for (r = .28, p< .001).

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• There is a weak but significant relationship with conscientiousness (r = .14, p< .05), but no significant relationship with any of the other psychological variables

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• Students are submitting their assignments at all hours … and this doesn’t seem to affect how well they do.

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Time of day submitted

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• When we have the full data-set of psychological measures and LearnSmart usage for the entire cohort we will be able to match this up with other behavioural data from BlackBoard – Course Access

– Missed submissions

– Usage of other supplementary materials

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Final thoughts … future questions …

• Data from Semester 1 indicates that LearnSmart usage has an impact on academic success above and beyond what we would expect given individual differences in intellectual ability and personality traits

• This suggests the tool is actually working – What is it about the tool that causes this?

– What other sorts of tools might lead to similar improvements?

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Take-Home Message!

• The psychological variables predict academic success and behavioural patterns – There are interesting and meaningful relationships between these

variables

– You should consider including psychological measures in your investigations

– Without controlling for these psychological variables you cannot make any strong conclusions about learning analytics/behavioural data and academic outcomes

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Questions?

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Contact: [email protected]

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Cognitive, personality and behavioural predictors of academic success in a large undergraduate...

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