Case Study of STACK assessments in Maths for Economists

In our talk on 19th June of 2024, we presented our experiences with the implementation of STACK tasks in Mathematics for economics lectures at two different medium-sized German universities within the framework of our project LLV.HD. We found a drastically different usage of STACK by the students. Both universities used online assessments with quite different modi, learning opportunities, workloads and circumstances. We incorporated 3 almost identical STACK tests at both courses with different incentives to engage in the tasks.

Course A has a relatively mild workload, consisting of a 1-hour small-group tutorials, 1-hour plenary tutorial class and 3 hours of lectures and bi-weekly STACK tests, whereas course B has 6 hours of lectures with 2 hours of tutorials and additional leaning opportunities, as well as an additional Moodle course for online assessments with weekly STACK tests, while the online assessments in course A were integrated in one sole Moodle course. These were incentivized with bonus points for exam in Course A when reaching 70% of the score in a test and the announcement to take 10% exam questions from the online assessments in Course B.

In Course A, the incentives along with the lower workload led to high interactions with the STACK tests. By the abundance of offers and choices to make, the STACK tests are not as frequently used in Course B and the scores are lower than in Course A. Only around 25% of the students even registered for the additional Moodle course. Despite using basically the same digital material in two seemingly comparable curricula, it turns out to be problematic to compare their usage due to the differing teaching scenarios. This suggests that the effectiveness of a digital tool depends on multiple factors, such as the student cohort, incentives, the course and the implementation in the course.

PDF of slides from this talk