Improving Student Motivation through Competitive Active Learning

This Research Work in Progress paper introduces the Competitive Learning Platform (CLP), an online tool that provides automatic partial performance feedback to students or groups of students on individual or collaborative assignments. CLP motivates students to think outside-the-box and come up with novel solutions that can lead to improved assignment results before the assignment deadline. We developed the CLP system as an Active Learning tool for encouraging and motivating student engagement in a STEM course. In this paper, we describe the CLP system and present the results of a set of analyses aimed at gauging the impact of competitive Active Learning activities using the CLP system on student motivation, engagement, and performance. The analyses are based on CLP submission, student outcome, and student feedback data obtained from 5 STEM undergraduate and graduate course offerings over 3 semesters. Results indicate that competitive active learning is beneficial in this setting, leading to active student participation and improved motivation.