COURSE CODE: FOUN 1106

COURSE TITLE: Academic English for Research Purposes

CREDIT ASSIGNMENT 1: Summary

I.D: 813001459

INSTRUCTOR: Ms. Leiba-Ann Ferreira

Ian Douglas and Nicole D. Alemanne conducted a research study titled, Measuring Student Participation and Effort. Their hypothesis was that the amount of effort devoted to the learning process determines a students success in a course. Thusly a research group was generated consisting of thirty out of thirty-two students who were part of an online Masters program in Library and Information Science which occurred during the spring semester of 2007. The data that was statistically analysed was the combined participation score (number of times a student voluntarily spoke in class, discussion posts, email contacts with the instructor) which provided flexibility in participation and the web click rate on the website. The performance measure was based on the final exam scores which illustrated that the students with the highest participation in the combined measures performed the best. The second data analysis was a comparison in exam performance between two groups in terms of whether they scored above or below the mean of ten for group one and a mean of eleven for group two. The results portrayed in both cases showed that those who scored above the mean performed significantly better than those who scored below it. Therefore the data suggested that class participation or effort in terms of the combined measure and web clicks proved to be an adequate predictor of academic performance. The implications of the data was that it can be a useful in improving learning management tool thereby granting instructors greater efficiency in their ability to intervene to prevent failure.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Douglas, Ian and Alemanne, D. Nicole Measuring Student Participation and Effort. IADIS

International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA 2007).