(372k) Impact of Online Numerical Response Questions on Student Learning in Parallel Sections

Thermodynamics is taught at The University of Akron as a 4 credit course in the Spring of the Sophomore year. The course follows on the Material and Energy Balances course based on the text of Felder et al. In recent years, growing class sizes have led to offering the course in two sections taught in parallel with different instructors. For the past two years (2017 and 2018), the course was taught with the same textbook (Elliott and Lira, 2012), and identical tests and final exam on identical dates. The course implements three projects, a weekly workbook that emphasizes concept tests and practice test questions, standard weekly homework problems, and an average to two 10 minute video assignments per lecture. In 2017, both sections applied a weekly in-class 20 minute quiz, but "Section E" also included in-class 15 minute quizzes designed to check whether the students had watched the videos. The result in 2017 was that both sections performed practically the same on all three tests and the final exam. In 2018, the in-class "video check" quizzes in Section E were put on-line in the format of numerical response questions with randomly generated prompts and formulas generated to automatically grade student responses in real time. The on-line "video check" quizzes offered several benefits at the outset: saving class time, no time pressure, multiple attempts (usually 2). More importantly, significant differences were observed between Section E and "Section Z" on test performance. Section E performed 12% better than Section Z on Test 1, and 15% better on Test 2. This corresponds to the difference between a 72% average for one section and a 57% average for the other, as an example. For Test 3, both sections were assigned the same video check quizzes, but no results are available for Test 3 as of this writing. Student perceptions were also surveyed through the same quizzes and these will also be presented and interpreted. After many years of applying many technologies and new methods in the classroom, no technique has had such a significant and demonstrable impact in such a short time. Creation of the question database is somewhat labor intensive, but it is available as a D2L package that is also portable to Blackboard. Porting has been tested across D2L platforms only.