Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to report some preliminary empirical results of students enrolled in two graduate-level hybrid courses. A new design feature, the discussion board, was recently implemented in one section in order to increase overall interaction as well as to better monitor and assess student learning. The preliminary results of this study indicate that students who were more actively involved with the course materials, discussions, and others in the class performed better academically than students who were less involved. The results support formal asynchronous discussions as one teaching strategy that might facilitate the learning of statistics concepts online. There have been no empirical studies that focus on how effective asynchronous discussions might be utilized in an online/hybrid statistics course.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Accreditation and assuring quality in distance learning (2002) Council for Higher Education Accreditation, CHEA Monograph Series, 1, 5
Utts J, Sommer B, Acredolo C, Maher M, Matthews H (2003) A study comparing traditional and hybrid internet-based instruction in introductory statistics classes. J Stat Educ 11(3), http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v11n3/utts.html
Ward B (2004) The best of both worlds: a hybrid statistics course. J Stat Educ 12(3), http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v12n3/ ward.html
Arnold N, Ducate L (2006) Future foreign language teachers’ social and cognitive collaboration in an online environment. Lang Learn Technol 10(1), http://llt.msu.edu/vol10num1/arnoldducate/default.html
Pawan F, Paulus T, Yalcin S, Chang C (2003) Online learning: patterns of engagement and interaction among in-service teachers. Lang Learn Technol 7(3), http://llt.msu.edu/vol7num3/pawan/
Gal I, Ginsburg L, Schau C (1997) In: Gal I, Garfield J (eds) The assessment challenge in statistics education. IOS Press, Amsterdam, pp 37–51
Mills J, Johnson E (2004) An evaluation of ActivStats® For SPSS® for teaching and learning. Am Stat 58(3):254–258
Moore D (1997) New pedagogy and new content: the case of statistics. Int Stat Rev 65(2):123–137
Schellens T, Valcke M (2005) Collaborative learning in asynchronous discussion groups: what about the impact on cognitive processing? Comput Human Behav 21:957–975
DeWert M, Babinski L, Jones B (2003) Safe passages: providing online support for beginning teachers. J Teacher Educ 54(4):311–320
Keppel G, Wickens T (2004) Design and analysis: a researcher’s handbook. Pearson/Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ
Cohen J (1977) Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (rev ed). Academic Press, Orlando, FL
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mills, J.D. (2009). Developing Statistics Learning at a Distance Using Formal Discussions. In: Mastorakis, N., Mladenov, V., Kontargyri, V. (eds) Proceedings of the European Computing Conference. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 27. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-84814-3_36
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-84814-3_36
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-84813-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-84814-3
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)