Web-based automatic feedback on assignments in statistics: how can it help students learn statistics and universities reduce costs?
Year: 2010
Type: article
Study design: Clinical Trial
Abstract: A non-experimental study in 2005 suggested that immediate, automatic feedback on assignments\nhelped to increase study motivation as well as pass rate among engineering students attending an\nintroductory course in statistics at Oslo University College. In the follow-up study reported here we\nused an experimental design assigning the participants randomly to one of two experimental\nconditions: The ‘web-supported’ students received immediate, automatic feedback after having\nentered their responses to the assignments electronically. The ‘paper-supported’ students received\nwritten feedback on their paper-based submissions several days later. The findings contradicted the\nresults of the non-experimental study: no significant differences between the groups were found\nwith regard to final examination grades, study effort (with a certain qualification) and preferences\nwith regard to the method for submitting answers. Running tutoring costs, however, were much\nlower for the web-supported than for the paper-supported students.Therefore, the present methodologically\nimproved study strengthens the evidence that such learning support may help reduce\nrunning tutoring costs without significantly lowering final examination grades. Reinforcing this\nconclusion, certain remaining weaknesses in the experimental procedure open the possibility that\nthe final examination grades of the paper-supported students have been inflated relative to those of\nthe web-supported students. Moreover, questionnaire data and informal observations obtained\nduring this experiment suggest that the tested web-based system of learning support can be\ncombined with more traditional ways of promoting learning that may help increase learning with\nonly a small increase in tutoring costs. These challenges with regard to the test methodology and the\ndesign of the learning-support system need to be addressed in new experiments.\nKeywords: web-supported learning; automatic feedback; immediate feedback; tutoring costs;\nstatistics
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics and Probability
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1678273097