Radboud University - Personalised Statistics Education with Grasple

“We offer no bonus marks or other incentives for using Grasple, yet the majority of students use the tool. Almost all students use Grasple, and the majority complete most or all of the modules. So I think it’s very clear to students what they gain by completing the modules.”

- Dr. Leontien de Kwaadsteniet, Radboud University

Personalised education has been a buzzword for several years in the education community. But what does a personalised approach to education actually look like? And does it deliver the promised results?

Dr. Leontien de Kwaadsteniet is a statistics teacher at Radboud University. She teaches in the Pedagogical and Educational Sciences department, instructing future educators on how to meaningfully analyse data using statistics. She is the course coordinator for Analysis 1 and 2, meaning she works extensively with first-year university students with varying levels of prior statistics knowledge and skills.

Given this context, Leontien needs adaptable, interactive learning materials. Materials that motivate students to practise, meet them at their current level of understanding, and provide personalised feedback to help them learn from their mistakes. Materials that don’t just show students the answers, but every step along the way.

That’s why Leontien has made Grasple an integral part of her teaching since 2020. She and her colleagues at Radboud University have created materials that leverage Grasple’s adaptable, personalised learning platform to increase student motivation and participation in their first-year statistics courses with the aim of improving students’ results.

We spoke with Leontien to learn how she used to approach providing practice materials, how she fit Grasple into her pedagogical approach, and the results of implementing Grasple in her courses.

The Old Solution

Like many teachers, Leontien did not start teaching immediately with a learning platform like Grasple.

“We had been talking about using digital tools and platforms for exercises for some time before we began using Grasple,” Leontien told us. The primary motivator was a need for more interactive and engaging practice materials.

“We used to have these digital documents. One with questions and a separate document with the answers and explanations.”

While this solution did provide students with helpful practice materials, there were still several drawbacks.

“In some cases, students could just look at the answer without making an effort to first solve the problem,” Leontien remarked. “For other students, these worked-out solutions allowed them to see how problems could be solved. However, this may have led some students to overestimate their own understanding, as recognizing a solution is different from being able to apply the method independently.”

This need for more interactive learning materials, paired with the shift to online education during the COVID-19 pandemic, led Leontien and her colleagues at Radboud university to reevaluate their approach to online practice and learning materials. That’s when Leontien went all in on Grasple.

Implementing a Persoanlised Approach with Grasple

"When the student gets a question, they have to try their best multiple times before they get to the actual answer. For each attempt, they can get personalised feedback. That’s especially helpful because they get a hint instead of the correct answer immediately. They can try again with that specific feedback in mind and it helps them improve their understanding.”

Leontien’s first experiments with integrating Grasple into her teaching looked a bit different than her current model.
“The idea initially was a flipped classroom - we would give students the modules and exercises, they would do them before coming to class, and in class we would go over what they learned, discuss difficulties, and explore the material in more depth.”

While Grasple has been used successfully in this model at other universities such as Utrecht University, in the initial small pilot at Radboud University, it didn’t resonate strongly with students.

“But then COVID came and we had to teach online a lot. And my colleagues and I decided to continue developing course materials with Grasple because it is a really easy to use infrastructure . I could appreciate its value. But we had to use it differently.”

Leontien then shifted her implementation of Grasple towards an emphasis on personalised learning by empowering students to create their own learning journeys depending on their level, learning style, and preferences. To facilitate this, Leontien and her colleagues in the Pedagogical Sciences and Education department created extensive Grasple modules. These modules contain both explanatory slides and practice exercises designed to break down the material into steps and encourage step-by-step problem solving.

Leontien explains that “We decided to keep the lectures as the basis for explaining everything and then students could do Grasple modules as an elaborate summary of the lecture, including questions to check their understanding. The nice thing about this set up is that it gives students the choice. They can use it after the lecture but, if they prefer, and if they find the lectures difficult, they can also use it before the lectures. If everything is really easy, they can also just do the exercises. Although I think most students still run through the complete module.”

Leontien and her colleagues also incorporated personalised learning into the questions themselves, primarily by using Grasple’s specific feedback feature - where students are shown feedback for the specific common mistake they made. This feedback adapts to the needs of the student and helps them understand at which step in the process they made a mistake more effectively than generic feedback.

According to Leontien “Grasple is a much better way to learn when compared to our old document method. That’s because when the student gets a question, they have to try their best multiple times before they get to the actual answer. For each attempt, they can get personalised feedback. That’s especially helpful because they get a hint instead of the correct answer immediately. They can try again with that specific feedback in mind and it helps them improve their understanding.”

How Students Reacted

“In the open comments of our course evaluations, students always leave spontaneous, positive remarks about Grasple. Students are really really enthusiastic about Grasple."

The combination of Grasple’s user-friendly platform and Leontien’s pedagogical framework had an immediate and positive impact on students.

“The first thing students remarked was that Grasple was really easy to work with and the explanations were clear. For one lecture we have multiple modules, so it offers the theory in blocks. They find Grasple makes it simpler, because of the little steps and the comprehension questions we put in between to check their understanding before continuing to the next key idea.”

The interactivity of the practice materials also generated a noticeable uptick in participation.

“If I look at the progress rates, you can see that students have been practising so much. I think it’s much more engagement than we had with the other kinds of exercises that we offered. I don’t think the engagement is this high with a digital document, for example.”

Additionally, Grasple’s mastery level system provides easy-to-understand feedback for students about their overall level of comprehension and acts as a motivator. Depending on their mastery of a subject, students receive colour-coded checkmarks: red if they seem to be lacking an understanding of the key concepts, yellow if they have made progress but still have room for improvement, and green when they have mastered the concepts. According to Leontien “Students like to get a lot of green checks.”

Another key element of Grasple’s success in this course was the personalisation, adaptability and accessibility offered by the platform.

“Students choose which modules they complete and when they complete them. They can do it on their own schedule, even on their phones on the train if they want. The ability to learn from anywhere is very valuable for them.”

Furthermore, Grasple automatically uses spaced-repetition when students start a practice session. This is a way of refreshing the concepts after a set interval to ensure the knowledge is retained. You can read more about the benefits of spaced-repetition in this blog post. Leontien says that students have mentioned this feature in particular.

“The students appreciate that Grasple is adaptive - if they practise, they see the questions they got wrong again.”

Year after year, students make their appreciation of Grasple well-known. “In the open comments of our course evaluations, students always leave spontaneous, positive remarks about Grasple. Students are really really enthusiastic about Grasple. In courses without as much Grasple material, like our psychometrics course, we’re always being asked ‘why don’t we have Grasple here too? We like it so much.’ We’re working on developing more materials for more courses partially because we know students will use and appreciate the materials.”

Improved Results

The results of this increase in engagement with practice materials speak for themselves. According to Leontien “There appears to be a correlation between the extent to which a group of students use Grasple and results of that group. However, this requires more investigation to draw more specific conclusions.”

“We offer no bonus marks or other incentives for using Grasple, yet the majority of students use the tool. In 2026, there were hardly any students who did not use Grasple. Overall, more than 80% of students completed at least half of all available material, and 70% completed at least 75% of all material. So, almost all students use Grasple, and the majority complete most or all of the modules. So I think it’s very clear to students what they gain by completing the modules.”

Looking Forward - Sharing with Radboud University and the world!

Radboud University uses Grasple in a number of other departments as well, including psychology and AI, with each department currently creating their own materials independently. Leontien and her colleagues have spent years refining their Grasple content. Leontien feels as though others could benefit from using the high-quality learning materials created by herself and her colleagues in their courses as well.

“No one is currently using these materials. My colleagues and I worked hard and spent quite a lot of time making Grasple materials that work for our students. The materials are easy to copy and adapt, so we’d be very happy if others could also benefit from the work we did.”

One of the biggest barriers to adopting a new tool is concerns around the time investment or amount of high-quality, ready-to-use learning material available on the platform. That’s why Leontien is enabling colleagues across Radboud University to bypass a significant portion of the content creation phase. Other teachers can simply copy, review, and personalise the materials, then go straight to teaching, rather than building a course from the ground up.

Knowing that others could benefit from using these materials, Leontien has kindly agreed to make the Grasple courses created by her and her colleagues available to teachers at Radboud university as an organisation course. This means everyone at Radboud university will be able to create a copy of these thoughtfully crafted courses in a single click, saving educators significant time and effort. Teachers can then select, adapt, and use materials from this course in their own teaching. Click here for more information on Grasple’s Organisation Courses feature.

We’d like to thank Leontien again for taking the time to share her insights with us. Leontien also had some suggestions for ways we could improve Grasple; we’ll continue to work with her and other teachers to co-develop solutions for Grasple. If you have feedback regarding any of Grasple’s features, please contact us at support@grasple.com.

If you’re as impressed with the work of Leontien and her colleagues at Radboud University as we are, you can experience it for yourself by creating a FREE teacher account and sending a request to access it to hello@grasple.com. Leontien and her colleagues would also be happy receive feedback from other teachers using their materials, as well as suggestions for improvements and additions. Email us with your comments at hello@grasple.com and we’ll be sure to pass the message along!