Virtual courses create a self-directed learning environment for students. Given that online environments provide anonymity so that the emphasis is on the content, rather than on the form of the message or the identity of the sender (Herring, 1993) this study assesses students’ personal usages in an online collaboration across several states and semesters. In examining the student and instructor perspective, the findings are significant in that, students engage in reflective work employing academic quality discussions across varying institution types from community colleges to public and private universities and that their discussions occur without gender or question type biases. Semester-end surveys confirm that an asynchronous e-learning collaboration enhanced their educational experience and they belonged to a global community of learners. This study adds its significant findings about the growth of online discussions promoting and enhancing the experience of e-learners and collaborative endeavors.
There is tremendous nonrandom variation from state to state in the rates at which people overreport voting in the Current Population Surveys (CPS). What accounts for this state-level bias in overreporting? We find that the determinants of statewide rates of overreporting parallel those in our earlier findings on individual-level overreporting: overreporting is a function of higher concentrations of racial and ethnic minorities, higher rates of religious membership, and being in the Deep South. These relationships are remarkably stable over time (1980-2000), and they are unaltered by improvements in how we measure overreporting. We suggest a method for deflating reported statewide registration figures to account for this bias, assuming that these registration figures are inflated in the same way as are statewide voting figures. We replicate and extend a part of Brown, Jackson, and Wright's (1999) analysis using these deflated figures, showing that our approach can improve explanation.
Research indicates that when instructors interact with students online their academic engagement increases, yet there is little research on student peer interactions and its effectiveness in terms of academic engagement. This study evaluates peer deliberations on a collaborative website for students enrolled in an American politics course at two institutions. Significant evidence reveals that student peer interactions produce academically reflective engagement, and their interactions personalize these online spaces and extend peer deliberations over every question asked of them during the semester. This article expands research on peer interactions online by utilizing an online collaborative site as an innovative means to engage students in academic deliberation.
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