“Hits” (not “Discussion Posts”) predict student success in online courses: A double cross-validation study
Section snippets
Background
The demand for online university courses continues to grow. Each year new online courses and programs become available from universities and colleges across the country. The traditional classroom instruction model continues to be challenged as the demand for innovative and technologically advanced course delivery increases. In response to the growing interest in distance education, research on distance education has emerged in several areas.
One area of study has focused on comparing student
Participants
The research participants were all students attending a small liberal arts college in Hawaii. The ethnic breakdown of the university that year was 38% Caucasian, 25% Asian, 22% Pacific Islander, 11% mixed ancestry, 1% African American, 1% Latino, and 1% American Indian. The ethnic breakdown of the students who participated in the courses under study was similar to that of the university overall. Two courses were chosen for study. The initial validation study was performed on a Community
Regression analysis of the outcomes in the community psychology course
Table 1 presents descriptive statistics for the total of the quiz scores, the number of page hits, discussion posts, and discussion reads for the 67 students who were enrolled in Community Psychology. Table 2 presents Pearson’s product–moment correlation coefficients for the same variables. As can be seen from Table 2, neither reads nor posts correlated significantly with quiz scores. However, page hits were positively correlated with quiz score.
Exploratory data analysis was conducted to check
Discussion
In the present study we explored two hypothesis: (1) Which, if any, of three predictor variables (page hits, discussion reads, or discussion posts) accounted for success in class (as measured by total quiz score)? and, (2) Does the resulting regression equation reliably predict outcome? The answer to the first question was that page hits was the only predictor of success. The answer to the second was that page hits are a very reliable means of predicting success.
Stepwise multiple regression was
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2020, Computers and EducationCitation Excerpt :Discussion groups with large numbers of students are correlated with high volumes of communication, which can lead to information overload and may cause students to decrease their level of active and passive participation as the number of postings increases (Jones, Ravid, & Rafaeli, 2004; Kim, 2013). Much of the online participation research to date has focused on examining the relationship between student participation in online discussion boards and learning outcomes (Cheng et al., 2011; Goggins & Xing, 2016; Koprinska, Stretton, & Yacef, 2015; Ramos & Yudko, 2008; Wei, Peng, & Chou, 2015). Few studies take into account the demographic characteristics of online students and those that do contradict each other in their findings of whether and how participation varies with respect to gender, race/ethnicity, and age.
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