Large classes offer a major challenge to giving guidance and feedback to students. Online homework assignments with automated feedback offer potential for student practice and guidance. In the study of such homework in Economics and Business Statistics courses, there was an advantage not only for multiple choice items, but but essays which become easier to grade when posted online (no need to deal with handwriting fog!).
Tools for applications discussed in this session included MyEconLab, Respondus, and Aplia in the Moodle LMS. With the homework system, students often also have the advantage of teh e-text, which tends to be cheaper than the print textbook.
Student surveys showed that most felt that they learned more from online homework, and some saw no particular difference with homework online; most felt that it took less time or that there was no difference in the time required to do online homework. The Pearson correlation coefficient did not show a strong correlation of homework grades with the final exam scores. Additional analysis needs to be done to complete the study.
Even though students reported that the homework helped them to learn, they reported that they probably would not do the homework if it were not graded.
Presenter: David Doorn, University of Minnesota Duluth
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