Online Homework: Student Attitudes and Learning Outcomes in a General Economics Courses

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

Interactive StudyMate TM-Generated Electronic Study Aids: Do Students Find Them Useful as Learning Resources?

The presentation began with a review of the options made available with the use of StudyMate 2.0, and a review of examples (flash cards, matching, crosswords, fill-in-the-blank, glossary, quiz, and challenge game). Use of this tool offers more elements of interactivity and feedback. Images and other media can be integrated.

The primary motivation for investing development in the StudyMate activities was to get students to participate. Large numbers of students were doing poorly, were not engaged in lectures, and would not come to office hours. If students would not interact with the course content, they would be unlikely to succeed in the course.

The electronic study aids were made available for freshmen to use in 8 sections of a beginning course taught by 5 instructors. A survey was given at the end of the course to determine whether students had used the materials, when they used them, and their perceptions of their value to their learning. Results indicated high use, high ratings for their effectiveness, and use at all hours except 3 am to 6 am and more late at night. Students had a high preference for feedback (96%) with the ESAs and would prefer a Web link with more quality information with the feedback (87%). If ESAs could be loaded on to iPods or other portable players, about 60% would probably download and use them.

There was no comparison to measures of learning outcomes (grades).

Presenter: David Kreller, Georgia Southern University