Helping Struggling Students: The Impact of Three Instructional Interventions on College Students’ Exam Scores and Exam-Skipping Behavior

Abstract

Whether instructional-communication feedback sent to struggling students and succeeding students following course exams would significantly increase their exam scores and significantly decrease their exam-skipping behavior relative to students in the control group was investigated. An experimenter-blind study utilizing feedback and the personalization principle was conducted. Undergraduate students (N = 122) were randomly assigned to the control group and the experimental group – the instructional-communications group. After each exam, an instructional intervention using instructional-communication feedback was sent. Struggling students who received instructional-communication feedback had higher exam scores and skipped fewer exams than struggling students in the control group for all exams. For exam 2, there was a statistically significant exam score difference (one half-letter grade: 4.93%) between struggling students in the experimental and control groups. For exam 2, the proportion of students in the experimental group that engaged in exam-skipping behavior was significantly smaller than the control group, with a percentage difference of 9.46% – a 43.07% decrease relative to the control group. For struggling students, instructional communications with tailored content significantly increased student test performance. For all students, instructional communications significantly decreased student exam-skipping behavior. The results of this study provide evidence of the efficacy of using personalization-based tailored instructional communications.