A Study of Voluntary Problem Sets on Student Interest, Motivation, and Performance

Various types of course assignments are often structured with different learning goals in mind. Homework assignments are designed to provide students with the necessary practice to hone skills, quizzes are designed to make sure students stay current with course topics, and exams are designed to allow students to demonstrate mastery of the material. Extra credit work, which the students can engage in voluntarily and which is usually used only to provide a small grade boost to offset the difficulty of a challenging course, may accomplish much more. This study seeks to investigate how voluntary, extra credit problem sets may be used to reach more elusive learning objectives such as to expose students to broad-scope topics, to encourage students to put more effort into the course, and most importantly to increase students’ level of self-motivation to investigate class topics further, beyond what normal time commitments might allow. Students were presented with a series of non-mandatory, free-response problems in the form of a thirty-day endurance challenge. The students had thirty days to solve thirty problems in addition to the normal workload of homework, quizzes, and exams they were asked to complete. Each daily problem opened to the students at 12:01 am and was due at 11:59 pm that evening. Students had only that twenty-four-hour period to complete each problem though each was designed to take only about twenty minutes to an hour to solve. To further encourage constructive competition between students and to bolster each student’s sense of self-motivation, daily challenge leaderboards were posted. The leaderboards anonymously displayed each student’s accumulated earnings in the challenge at the end of each day. Student performance data was collected throughout the course and from their collegiate record to date and correlated to their participation and performance in the thirty-day challenge. Data taken included student individual course grades at the time the challenge started, individual course grades at the time the challenge ended, overall grade point average to date, and the total amount of points earned and number of problems completed during the thirty-day challenge. After the challenge ended students were surveyed to gauge how valuable the students felt the challenge was to their overall course performance and whether they felt the voluntary problems and the leaderboard display of scores contributed to their sense of self-motivation.