General Chemistry Student Attitudes and Success with Use of Online Homework: Traditional-Responsive versus Adaptive-Responsive

We investigated whether use of an adaptive-responsive online homework system (OHS) that tailors homework to students’ prior knowledge and periodically reassesses students to promote learning through practice retrieval has inherent advantages over traditional-responsive online homework. A quasi-experimental cohort control post-test-only design with nonequivalent groups and propensity scores with nearest neighbor matching (n = 6,114 pairs) was used. The adaptive system was found to increase the odds of a higher final letter grade for average, below average, and failing students. However, despite the learning advantages, students self-reported less favorable attitudes toward adaptive-responsive (3.15 of 5) relative to traditional-responsive OHS (3.31). Specific to the adaptive OHS, the following were found: (i) student attitudes were moderately and positively correlated (r = 0.36, p < 0.01) to final letter grade, (ii) most students (95%) reported engaging in remediation of incorrect responses, (iii) a majori...