Prof. Kobi Gal

We investigate the possibility of increasing students’ performance and motivation in e-learning through choice: allowing students to choose educational material and questions while learning online. We ran a user study in which 5th grade students were repeatedly able to choose between a pair of math questions that were chosen from ascending skill levels based on performance. Our results show that students answered more difficult questions and obtained better grades when they were allowed to choose the questions than a baseline approach which did not allow choice. Also, we found a strong correlation between the skill levels that were obtained by the students in the choice based system and their class grades. Finally, most students preferred the choice system over a non-choice system.