We evaluate the efficacy of a blended formative/summative assessment tool developed to support mastery learning by students without placing undue burden on instructors. Our innovation provides students with an opportunity to take a more difficult "challenge" quiz to demonstrate their command of the material and improve their grade on regular in-class quizzes. The structure of these quizzes motivates students to modify study behaviors (formative component) and take responsibility for knowledge acquisition (summative component). This mastery-based testing approach serves to bring the student's objective of a quality grade in line with the instructor's objective of quality learning.
ABSTRACT: The strategy of evaluating students' achievement using a marking system is a common practice in higher education institutions. The result of a student's effort is usually communicated in the form of a letter grade or percentage correct on an exam or on the course as a whole. Although a vast majority of instructors use various grading policies and the impact of different grading policies on learning is a basis of considerable debate among academics, the empirical work regarding the impact of different grading policies on students' performance does not include applications to accounting, a discipline for which student learning is directly tied to success in passing professional examinations. Theoretically, one of the functions of a grading system is to motivate students to work harder and perform better. This study provides insight into the impact of a lenient grading scale versus a strict grading scale on students' achievement, where the level of "average" mastery in the latter category (the grade of C), is coincident with the minimum passing requirement of the professional accounting examinations. The results of this study support the notion that an attainable strict grading policy can be used as an important pedagogical technique to motivate students to study and may provide insight into grade scale decisions faced by accounting faculty seeking to prepare their students for the rigor of professional exams. Contrary to prior results in the literature, we find that when used in an upper-level undergraduate accounting course the stricter standard has a more profound effect on achievement for students at the lower end of the grade distribution.
The importance of quantitative skills in learning economics cannot be overstated. Many previous studies have attempted to measure the degree to which such skills impact performance in economics classes. Typically these studies have relied on a proxy for measuring quantitative skills, such as the number and type of math courses a student has completed. Yet it is the proficiency in math rather than the exposure to it that is expected to impact the learning of economics and performance in economics courses. In this paper we use a pre and post course math quiz to address two major research questions. First, we examine the degree to which students who have greater math aptitude also have a better grasp of basic economics concepts prior to taking a principles of economics course. Second, we explore the degree to which this math aptitude is correlated with higher economic learning. Our results indicate that (prior to taking a principles of economics course) students do not fare well on simple quantitative questions and hence do not possess an adequate working knowledge of the "language" we often speak during our economics courses. Our analysis shows, however, that quantitative literacy is a very important determinant of economic literacy in both the pre and post course surveys. More specifically, we have shown that having skills such as being able to solve a system of equations and compute a percentage, and being able to interpret increases and decreases on a graph will lead to higher economic knowledge at the end of the semester.
