Using online quizzing and quiz results to improve study success.

The need to increase student success rates, especially in the first years of higher education, is becoming stronger and stronger. Online quizzing in the first years of undergraduate education is regarded as one possible way to improve time-on-task, student engagement and retrieval ability. Several studies are published that address the incorporation of online quizzing in higher education. These studies show mixed results with regard to study success. For example, in general, student opinions towards the use of online quizzes is positive, however the effect on time-on-task is just modest and the correlations with success rate vary from no correlation to significant correlations with modest effects. The studies incorporate various course set-ups and qualitative and quantitative analyses methods and take a different number of variables into account. These could be the cause of the different findings. In this paper, an overview of several studies is presented and discussed. Online quizzing will be related to the ideas of deliberate practice and possibilities of data-mining and feedback (learning analytics) to improve the possible generation of data on which students and educators can act on and to increase the impact of online quizzing.