Technology expands instructional options for faculty, and this study examines the differential learning effects of offering a lecture on physics to students in a traditional classroom versus internet video formats. Based on an experiment conducted in a natural educational context, results indicate enhanced transfer of lecture information in the video formats relative to the live condition, with students also responding more positively to personalized video presentation.
This study builds on research conducted by the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan in collaboration with the School of Education, the Minority Engineering Program Office, and industrial supporters, which exposed problems with student motivation in a required, first-year course in computing and programming. This paper describes the nature of an instructional intervention designed by the lead instructor for the course aimed to increase students' perception that computer programming and algorithmic thinking are (1) important and (2) useful to engineering majors. The conceptual framework for the study derives from Wigfield and Eccles' 10 expectancy/value model of student motivation. Multiple regression analysis of student survey responses revealed that students in the treatment group were more likely than those in a comparable, untreated, group to believe it is important that engineering majors learn to program, which suggests that instructors can directly influence student motivation. The treatment group was no more likely than the comparison group to believe that the ideas from the course would be useful in their future careers. This finding is partly attributable to our inability to control for the nature of the weekly assignments in the untreated group, which confounded our ability to fully evaluate the effect of the intervention on students' perception of the usefulness of the course. Gender, race/ethnicity, and prior programming experience were not significant predictors of perceptions of importance or usefulness. Student interest in the weekly programming assignments was the biggest predictor of agreeing that the course was important and useful, followed by a student's self-reported proficiency in programming. This result provides empirical evidence of the potential benefit of placing programming assignments in the context of technology applied to the improvement of society, to current events, or to technologies with which the students are familiar. An analysis of historical course grades-acknowledging the limitations of doing so-revealed that the gap between males and females and between minority and majority students narrowed during the semester of the intervention compared with a year earlier. Future interventions to bolster student motivation should include measures aimed specifically at improving programming proficiency, because our model predicts that lower levels of programming proficiency might cancel out the positive effect of creating interesting contexts for the weekly assignments as well as the positive benefits of directly addressing with students the importance of programming to engineering majors.
Using the need for math skills in geoscience courses as an example, Helen E. Burn and Eric M. D. Baer from Highline Community College and Jennifer M. Wenner from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh make the case for just-in-time embedded remediation to improve student learning while using class time effi ciently.
Geoscience relies on numbers, data, equations, graphical representations, and other quantitative skills; therefore, introductory geoscience courses need to accurately portray the science as quantitative [e.g., Wenner et al., 2009]. However, up to 57% of students arrive at college underprepared to perform mathematics at the level necessary to succeed in introductory courses [ACT, 2011]. Although some institutions have turned to prerequisites as a way to ensure appropriate preparation, these extra courses can place undue financial, temporal, and academic burdens on interested students, keeping them from enrolling in science courses that may interest them. As an alternative to mathematics prerequisites, geoscience faculty at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and Highline Community College in Des Moines, Wash., funded by the National Science Foundation, developed a model of successful integration of discipline‐based mathematics remediation into an introductory geoscience course: The Math You Need, When You Need It (TMYN; http://serc.carleton.edu/mathyouneed/).
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