THE EFFECT OF OPTIONAL RETESTING ON COLLEGE-STUDENTS ACHIEVEMENT IN AN INDIVIDUALIZED ALGEBRA COURSE

The sequential nature of mathematics requires that students master eac h set of concepts before proceeding to the next. Retesting is a strate gy for motivating students to relearn to a mastery level concepts and procedures not mastered initially. To test the effectiveness of this s trategy, the authors allowed college students in an intermediate algeb ra course 1 retest of every test on which they had earned a grade less than B, A significant increase in performance between the initial tes t and retest was found for approximately 90% of the students who had e arned a grade less than B on the initial test. Within each group of st udents eligible to retake a certain number of unit tests, the number o f unit tests that they actually retook was correlated with their grade on the final course examination. None of the correlations were statis tically significant. Thus, optional retesting appears to affect initia l mastery, but not cumulative mastery.