Gender differences in the use of an online homework system in an introductory physics course

Abstract

The two genders make different use of being allowed multiple tries to solve online homework problems: male students frequently attempt to immediately solve the problem, while female students are more likely to first interact with peers and teaching assistants before entering answers. More male than female students state that they use the multiple allowed attempts to enter “random stuff,” while more female than male students state that the multiple attempts allow them to explore their own problem solving approaches without worrying or being stressed out by grades

Analyzing the impact of course structure on electronic textbook use in blended introductory physics courses

“…Parsing these logs allows one to extract meaningful metrics on resource use and student behavior. [17,22,50,51] A single studentresource interaction contains at least the student ID, the ID of the accessed resource, and a time-stamp with a resolution in seconds. These tags allow us to count the number of accesses each student has with a given resource.…”

“…[17]) -simply accessing a page does not necessarily mean that the learner meaningfully interacted with it. Similar to triggers in a high energy detector, we need to filter out noise and non-events.…”

“…Equally important is LON-CAPA's legacy over more than a decade of having delivered resources in over 7,700 blended and online courses to over 960,000 student course enrollments. Student activity records from LON-CAPA courses have provided in-depth insight into student problem-solving behavior, [17,22,23] but little work has been aimed at interactions with etexts.…”

“…From these records, one can describe etext use metrics such as the overall use and the associated temporal pattern, providing an attractive alternative to student surveys. These records provide a unique window into the learning behavior of students [15][16][17][18][19] during activities traditionally performed beyond the instructor's scope, e.g., reading the textbook before lecture.…”

Harvesting latent and usage-based metadata in a course management system to enrich the underlying educational digital library

“…These items, alongside confidence measures ("error bars"), can be used as yet another quality and selection criterion as faculty assemble course materials. Also, time-ontask information can be gathered from the transaction logs, with the usual caveats applicable due to "multi-tasking" and guessing behavior of the learners [20]. Finally, all of these statistics will be noisy due to copying and cheating [21], so confidence measures are essential.…”