THE INFLUENCE OF DYNAMIC HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENTS ON STUDENTS' LEARNING BEHAVIOR

To counteract students' tendency for short-term learning behavior in the first year of their bachelor program, we introduced voluntary dynamic homework assignments in the course "Introductory Finance" at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. We analyze whether those assignments motivate students to begin learning earlier and practicing more exercises by using the logfiles of the university's e-learning platform. Our results show that, averaged over several exams, with homework assignments students start to learn earlier (three weeks before the exam instead of one week), learn more often (8 days instead of 5 days) and solve more exercises at the e-learning platform (223 instead of 147). Examining the data related to one single exam, it also turns out that there is a highly significant statistical difference between the groups of students who solve at least one homework assignment and those who don't. The one-way analysis of variance states that the first group achieves approximately 9 percentage points more at the final exam. Therefore (dynamic) homework assignments are an useful tool to counteract short-term learning behavior tendencies. Based on an e-learning platform, they can be easily employed for mass lectures, where those learning strategies are more inherent than in small seminars.