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| Pedagogical Evaluation | ||
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Co-Principal Investigator: Gisele Ragusa, Assoc. Prof. of Education Co-Principal Investigator: Erin Shaw, Research Computer Scientist Discussion boards have become an essential tool for communication in higher education, in part due to their integration into course management systems that are now centrally supported by many colleges and universities. Though discussion can range from goal-oriented help seeking to concept exploration to collaborative problem solving, there is no easy, adequate way to measure its impact on learning. And because discussion board participation cannot be robustly assessed, it is often regarded as tangential to achievement. The goal of the proposed research is to study the impact of student discussion on achievement and retention using new semi-automatic assessment techniques. The work will endeavor to answer the following questions. 1. Does the quantity and quality of participation in online course discussion boards affect student performance and retention? 2. Do different cohorts of students with different socio-demographic characteristics participate in discussion differently in terms of quantity and quality? The study will utilize student discussion data from discussion board enhanced STEM courses at USC and UC Irvine in the disciplines of computer science and industrial systems engineering. The study will computationally assess discussion quality and quantity in terms of a set of dialogue characteristics and correlate findings to student participation and characteristics from registrar and questionnaire sources. We will focus on effectiveness of communication as a means for measuring student learning and the further development of novel metrics based on current NLP techniques. |
[USC IRB Approval (October 2011)]
[USC FERPA Release]
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