Student grades data from an experimental setup

As part of an attempt to disentangle the effect of eText from that of the IPM, an experimental setup was undertaken. As part of this setup, and with the consent of the faculty member teaching the course, students in an IPM course where the same faculty member taught two or more sections were offered the option of swapping their IPM eText with a physical book at no extra charge. To maintain the IPM feature of day one access to resources, these books were delivered to the class on the first and second days of class.

In the Fall semester of 2017, this experimental setup was done with one course that had four sections taught by the same professor. Two of the four sections were randomly assigned as experimental groups with the other two being assigned as controls. In the Winter semester of academic year 2017/2018, this experimental setup was done with three different courses that had at least 2 sections each. One section of each course was randomly assigned as experimental, while the remaining sections were assigned as controls. For the purposes of maintaining anonymity, the courses will be referred to by number (i.e. Course 1 to 4), as will the sections (i.e. control section 1 will be C1; experimental section 1 will be E1; and so forth). Since the swap was voluntary, the table below describes the number of students in each section, as well as the number of students who opted to exchange their resource within the experimental sections.

Descriptive statistics for experimental and control sections