This paper assesses quantitatively the impact on student performance of a blended learning experiment within a large undergraduate first‐year course in statistics for business and economics students. We employ a difference‐in‐differences method, which controls for differences in student characteristics and course delivery method, to evaluate the impact of blended learning on student performance. Our results suggest that the impact of blended learning on student performance depends on whether the effect of blended learning is cumulative or not. Blended learning has no impact on student performance if learning is non‐cumulative and only affects the performance on the quizzes associated with the material covered by blended learning. However, if learning is cumulative and impacts the performance for the whole course, then our results strongly suggest a strong, negative effect. Taken as a whole, these results provide a possible explanation for why most of the existing studies focusing on short online courses have obtained neutral or even positive results while nearly all the studies focusing on semester‐length course tend to observe negative impacts from online learning.
With growing interest in storytelling as a pedagogy for students learning university introductory statistics, a need has arisen to develop appropriate research methodologies. This paper presents methodological insights from a study involving 31 university introductory statistics students who wrote contextualised stories about sampling distributions and the normal distribution. Data was generated using sound recordings of student interviews that captured reflections of their story writing experiences. An assumption-based, reflective analysis produced conjectures that generated preliminary research findings, which were then tested using the theoretical ideas of presupposition, subjectification, and multiple perspectives. The study’s findings suggest there is value in undertaking additional research into storytelling as a pedagogy. The methodology developed offers insights not only for future researchers in statistics education but also for other educational settings.
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