Assessing the Generality of a Self-Administered Strategic-Resource-Use Intervention on Academic Performance: A Multisite, Preregistered Conceptual Replication of Chen et al. (2017)

Chen et al. designed a novel strategic-resource-use (SRU) intervention that higher-education students could self-administer online. This intervention aimed to help students improve their performance by stimulating them to think about using learning resources for an exam preparation. The SRU intervention was tested in two undergraduate introductory-statistics courses. In the first experiment, students in the control condition received an email asking them to state their desired grade, how motivated they were to get that grade, how important it was to obtain the desired grade, and how confident they were in obtaining it. Participants in the experimental condition received the same mail and took the 15-min SRU intervention. On the final course exam, the SRU group outperformed the control group, yielding a small to medium effect size, a finding that was replicated in a second study. We conducted four preregistered conceptual replications of Chen and colleagues’ study in four undergraduate introductory-statistics courses at two Dutch higher-education institutions. In our study, the meta-analytic standardized effects on the final-exam scores in the intention-to-treat meta-analysis and the compliant-only analysis were small and not significantly different from 0, and the upper limits of the 95% confidence intervals of both meta-analyses were smaller than the effect sizes of the two studies reported by Chen and colleagues. Comparable results were obtained for the pass rates. Thus, the results of the present study failed to corroborate the previously demonstrated positive effect of the SRU intervention on final-exam scores and pass rates.