Thank you for the feedback! Maybe the following info will be helpful when considering our results:
1. Quiz completion is our deliberately conservative lower bound on reading compliance, and the 0.71 figure is not a claim that those 16 students each gained that much. The estimate is from a regression carried by the per-lesson slope, fit across the whole dosage distribution, and the underlying dosage-performance relationship is essentially unchanged whether or not zero-completion students are included (R² 0.091 vs 0.096). In other words, more Phosphor use is strongly associated with better performance across the whole range of usage - not just the group who completed all content.
The numbers in Table 1 show how dosage was distributed across the course. We report that across the class, the median percentage of lessons reached on Phosphor, including both students with an account and those who never logged in, was above 90%. Among platform users in particular, it was 96%.
We'd like to emphasize that for this pilot, the platform was presented to students as an entirely optional "study aid", and our adoption rates far exceed those reported in the past for optional interventions. It will be interesting to see how things go when we attach completion to the course grade, as we're thinking of doing in the fall. Past literature from interventions in college courses predicts that this will achieve far higher levels of engagement, bringing the high-dosage effect to a large proportion of the class.
2. We explicitly note this in Limitations; it's an observational study. We were unable to do an RCT for this course since it raised an ethics consideration - neither we nor the instructors wanted to deprive students entirely of a course material that could have been helpful for them. We'd love to run a randomized trial at some point though - one way to do this is a crossover, where we offer the treatment to one of two groups, then switch it over to the other midway through the trial, so that both get even treatment. Another possibility is randomly selecting students to get access to MCQ-only vs. CRQ-enabled quizzes. That being said, this mechanism of conditioning on past performance is well-known and relatively robust for observational studies of educational interventions.
3. The platform was created independently of the instructors of the course. The instructors designed their curriculum ahead of time (as had been taught for years of past offerings of the course), lectured in a conventional style, referenced the course's official textbook (Freedman, Pisani, Purves) and suggested homework problems from the textbook only. The instructional content was authored using material that every student in the course had access to, and did not feature exam questions that students were evaluated on after-the-fact.
Phosphor was not endorsed publicly by the instructors, and was spread primarily via student word-of-mouth. In fact, one instructor in this course initially believed the project would be "a waste of time" and refused to collaborate with us for the pilot. Despite this, 97% of the students in this instructor's section used the platform!
Engagement also persisted well across the full ten-week term, and two-thirds of Review attempts involved retries spaced a day or more apart — not a pattern typically produced by novelty effects.
4. Instructors wrote exams independently with their long-running FPP-based curriculum. Even if we steelman and suppose that "the platform just got students to engage" rather than truly learn, this is refuted by our result that the MCQ-only Module 2 had similar engagement but no dosage relationship. This strongly suggests that the CRQ format was a driver of the results.
As we mention in the paper, we agree that replication, especially across contexts, is a priority. For us in particular, this means not only across other courses, but across other institutions as well. And an RCT would certainly help lock in the causal claim.
I wonder if Autism would be even simpler to explain with a cliff-edged fitness function. Because there seems to be a high correlation between extremely intelligent people and people on the spectrum. Maybe the group of genes rewarded for high intelligence/creativity/quantitative ability also, by accidental design, inhibits social capacity.