Statistics through the medium of internet: what students think and achieve.

Abstract

The major aim of the present research was to compare expectations of students enrolled in the School of Education internet-based "Introduction to Statistics" course with those of students who participated in the School of Social Work traditional "Introduction to Statistics" course. . In addition students' performance, attitudes towards teaching and learning, and satisfaction after attending one semester in each course were assessed. Both courses were based on identical syllabi and content and with the only difference being the method of delivery

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Results indicate similar achievement levels of students who participated in internet-based and traditional lecture-based courses. Students who participated in the interact-based course had lower attitudinal levels on the research factors of "teaching and learning" and "satisfaction" than those who participated in the traditional lecture-based course in both "before" and "after" evaluations. However intra-group comparison for the students in the internet-based course indicated a significant increase in "after" attitudinal assessment.

Internet in Education

Radical improvements in learning and instruction have been made as a result of the advances achieved in three major areas: technology, measurement, and cognitive science (Bennett, 1999). Of the three, new technology has probably been the most influential in the short term. New technology has had the greatest influence because it is increasingly pervading our society. Billions of dollars are being invested annually to create and make commonplace powerful, general technologies for commerce, communications, entertainment, and education. Due to their generality, these technologies can also be used to improve learning and instruction (Wideman and Owston, 1999).

Bennett (2001) described the Internet as an interactive, switched, networked, and standards-based communication medium that has contributed significantly to many areas of endeavor and particularly to the learning and instructional processes.

* Interactive means that we can present a task to a student at the school or university level and quickly respond to that student's actions and assist the student when help is called for.

* Switched means that we can engage in different interactions with different students simultaneously. In combination, these two characteristics (interactive and switched) make for individualized learning and instruction.

* Broadband means that those interactions can contain lots of information. For learning and instruction, that information could include audio, video, and animation.

* Networked indicates that everything is linked. This linkage means that universities, schools, resource centers, teachers and students are tied together electronically. That electronic connection can allow for enormous efficiencies.

* Standards-based means that the network runs according to a set of conventional rules that all participants follow. That fact permits both the easy interchange of data and access from a wide variety of computing platforms, as long as the software running on those platforms (e.g., Internet browsers) adheres to those rules too.

As an embodiment of these abovementioned characteristics the Interact provides the potential to deliver efficiently and on a mass scale individualized, highly engaging learning and instructional content to almost any desktop and make information available to the teacher and student anytime day or night. Thus, the very essence of Internet is its efficiency, effectiveness, and its facilitating qualities that promise a long-awaited educational breakthrough at all educational levels.

The Internet at the University Level

Increasingly more university courses are being delivered to students through the medium of Internet (Wideman and Owston, 1999). Both university professors and students increasingly utilize the new medium to increase meaningful learning based on the use of online audio-visual material, databases, simulations and tutored exercises (Fabos and Young. 1999; Fetterman, 1998). Hellebrandt (1999) indicated that the Internet provides students with authentic learning materials - difficult to obtain in the traditional learning situation - that increase the effectiveness of learning and instruction.

Idrus and Latch (2000) confronted the implications of university learning and instruction using Internet -based courses. They contended that the Internet has moved formal instruction in these courses from the formal setting of the university campus to the home of the student. Learning has become significantly more flexible and content sources much more accessible. Creating, sharing and knowledge capitalization are all facilitated by Internet. Wider sources of learning are provided in Internet-based courses and worldwide expertise can systematically be brought to the student's desktop. In addition, a decade ago, Szuprowicz (1990) foresaw Internet-based university courses as contributing not only added learning and instructional efficiency to the educational process, but also improved cost-effectiveness in university tuition in that Internet-based courses can be made available to an almost infinite number of students.

The main aim of the present study was to examine the level of expectations and satisfaction of students enrolled in the Internet-based mandatory first-year "Introduction to Statistics" course at the Bar-Ilan University School of Education compared to the level of expectations and satisfaction of students attending the traditional mandatory first-year "Introduction to Statistics" course in the School of Social Work at the same university in pre and post participation examinations. In addition the study investigated the compared achievement of students participating in internet-based and lecture-based courses.

Method

Sample

The experimental group consisted of 186 (172 females and 14 males) first-year students enrolled in the School of Education at the Bar-Ilan University who were registered in a mandatory Internet-based "Introduction to Statistics" course. The internet-based course was the first course of its kind that these students attended. The control group was made up of 63 (54 females and 9 males) first-year students enrolled in the School of Social Work at the Bar-Ilan University who participated in a mandatory traditional lecture-based "Introduction to Statistics" course. Students in the experimental and control groups were accepted to their respective courses of study on the basis of grades attained in a psychometric entrance examination and in their school-leaving matriculation examinations. Mention should be made of the fact that School of Education and School of Social Work criteria of acceptance on the basis of psychometric and matriculation results are similar. In addition to cognitive similarities, students enrolled in Schools of Education and Schools of Social Work in Israel have similar social and ideological goals as both intend to work in the public educational or social sectors and serve similar populations. Almost all School of Education and School of Social Work students are female between the ages of 21 and 27 and have similar social and attitudinal profiles (Bar-Yaacov, 2001).

Instruments

Students in the experimental and control groups were administered a specially compiled 15-item questionnaire in a pretest-posttest experimental design. The questionnaire was designed to tap students' expectations from the Internet-based and lecture-based "Introduction to Statistics" courses as well as to ascertain students' level of satisfaction from the two respective courses. The items were compiled in conformity with a Likert Scale structure in which responses were provided on a five-point scale ranging from a very low level of expectation or satisfaction (1) to a very high level of expectation or satisfaction (5). The questionnaire was administered twice, the first time at the beginning of the courses and the second time after 60 hours of participation in the courses. In addition, grades attained by experimental and control group members in an identical end-of-course examination served as a basis for an additional inter-group comparison.

Procedure

The Interact-based "introduction to Statistics" course consisted of three key pedagogical elements which were integrated into the learning and instructional process. The first element was an audio-visual presentation of the material to the student who logged on to the course. In each lesson the professor taught content using aids, simulations and demonstrations. The second element consisted of a presentation of the lesson's content in full text specially compiled for the course. The third element consisted of pre-prepared exercises that the students answered and checked online. In addition students were administered online tests that were submitted to their professor for evaluation and assessment. Throughout the duration of the interact-based course students could correspond with their professor through email messages and consult the professor in a course chat-room. Students could log on to the course homepage flexibly and at their own convenience from the comfort of their own homes. These students attended face-to-face meetings with the professor three times during the course in order to provide input and solve any problems that were not solved through electronic contact.

The traditional lecture-based course consisted of two weekly sessions, one of two hours and one of one hour. During the two-hour meetings the professor presented the students with content matter, explained the material and answered any questions arising from the students' understanding of the material. During the one-hour weekly session the students participated in supervised exercise sessions in which they solved a series of problems directly related to the material taught in the weekly two-hour lecture. Students were at liberty to meet with the professor during reception hours in addition to the two weekly sessions they attended.

The students in both internet-based and traditional courses handed in similar exercises and took similar standardized examinations. The teachers in both courses participated in periodic faculty meetings in which the "Introduction to Statistics" course instructors met throughout the academic year in order to ensure that these courses would be similar regarding syllabi, content emphasis, and assessment. The examinations administered to the experimental and control group students were identical so that valid comparisons could be made.

Regarding the issue of cost-effectiveness (an issue not directly related to the needs of students in either the experimental, control, or comparison groups), the number of weekly faculty hours assigned to the internet-based course totaled 14 as opposed to 28 weekly faculty hours needed for the lecture-based course.

Results

The 15-item research questionnaire, specially compiled to assess the expectations and satisfaction of students regarding the use of internet-based methodology as opposed to traditional lecture based courses for the mandatory first-year "Introduction to Statistics" course was administered to the experimental and control groups in a "before-after" experimental paradigm. The data collected from the two groups underwent a primary components factor analysis with varimax rotation. The first factor yielded, labeled "teaching and learning", comprised 8 significant items that included understanding of the content matter, the connection between the student and the instructor, and the ability of the student to ask questions and solve problems. This factor had an eigenvalue of 7.55 and explained 50.33% of the variance. It also had a reliability level of 0.90 computed by the Cronbach Alpha method. The second factor yielded, labeled "satisfaction", constituted the exact 7 significant items in both before and after configurations and included flexibility of the instructional methodology, independence in revising the content matter, and a feeling of ease in the learning process. This factor had an eigenvalue of 1.32 and explained 8.84% of the variance and reached a Cronbach Alpha reliability coefficient of 0.84.

The mean scores and standard deviations on the two factors in the "before-after" paradigm are presented in Table 1. See issue's website http://rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/win01.htm>.

Thereafter, in order to establish possible inter-group and intra-group differences, a number of t-tests were computed. Inter-group comparisons for the two different instructional methodology groups were made in "before" and "after" independent sample t-tests. Paired sample t-tests were conducted for "before" and "after" comparisons within the experimental and control groups.

From the results of the t-test conducted to examine possible inter-group differences prior to the beginning of the course, it is apparent that the control group students who were destined to study in a traditional lecture-based course had higher expectations for both effectiveness of teaching and learning (t=-12.75, d.f.=164, p<0.001) as well as for expected satisfaction (t=-6.78, d.f.=164, p<0.001) than their internet-based course experimental group counterparts. Regarding inter-group differences between control group students and experimental group subjects, compared after participation in the traditional lecture-based and internet-based courses, the students who participated in the lecture-based course were significantly more positive than the students who studied in the internet-based course both for teaching and learning (t=7.21, d.f.=139, p<0.001) and for satisfaction (t=.79, d.f.=139, p<0.001).

In intra-group comparisons the experimental group students held significantly more positive attitudes towards teaching and learning (t= -3.64, d.f.=208, p<0.001) as well as towards satisfaction (t=-5.11, d.f.=208, p<0.001) after participating in the interact-based course. The control group students exhibited significantly more positive attitudes towards satisfaction (t=-3.05, d.f.=95, p<0.01) after participation in the lecture-based course. However participation in the traditional course did not bring about change in the attitudes of the control groups students towards teaching and learning (t=0.56, d.f.=95, p>0.05). Regarding academic achievement of experimental (M=81.20, S.D.=12.97) and control group (M=82.60, S.D.=11.65) students (in a post-test only configuration) no significant differences were evident for end-of-course examination scores between the experimental group and control group students and (t=0.73, d.f.=242, p>0.05).

Discussion

The results of the inter-group comparisons in this study indicate a complex picture regarding the attitudes as well as academic achievement of students who participated in the internet-based "Introduction to Statistics" course as opposed to those of students who participated in traditional lecture-based courses. The experimental group students exhibited lower attitudinal levels on the research factors, "teaching and learning" and "satisfaction", both before commencement as well as on conclusion of their internet-based course than did their control group counterparts who participated in a lecture-based course. However this finding seemingly contradicts the fact that no significant differences were found for achievement between the experimental and control group members.

A possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the students find it difficult to accept the new methodological paradigm of "teachers facilitating access to information for the learner" (Forsyth, 1998). This paradigm, applied in the internet-based course, is based on the premise that the student is the major focus of the instructional process and the teacher's role is to provide the student with the tools to become an independent learner. It appears that students prefer the traditional methodological paradigm of "teaching as telling" (Forsyth, op. cit.), which characterizes the lecture-based course, in which the teacher provides the student with all relevant knowledge necessary to understand the content being studied. Thus, despite the success of the new teaching direction that utilizes sophisticated technology to maintain or improve the level of student achievement, students are more positive about traditional instructional methods congruent with "teaching as telling" in which teachers serve as the major focus and model their students' knowledge.

Intra-group comparisons indicate that students who studied by way of traditional lecture-based instructional methodology demonstrated similar attitudinal levels towards `teaching and learning" in both before and after evaluations. This finding is not surprising as the students were completely familiar with the traditional teaching methodology and knew what to expect from the course. Regarding the attitudinal level for "satisfaction", the students' attitudinal level was significantly higher at the end of their course because of a natural initial resistance on the part of social science students to their participation in the mandatory "Introduction to Statistics" course. However, after experiencing the course personally, it seems that they overcame this reticence and were thus more satisfied on the conclusion of the course than they expected to be at its commencement.

The experimental group students exhibited higher attitudinal levels towards both "teaching and learning" and "satisfaction" on concluding their participation in the "Introduction to Statistics" course than they exhibited when the course began. This finding is supported by a number of research studies that indicate that students are apt to succeed in internet-based courses (e.g. Carswell, Thomas, Petre, Price and Richards, 2000; Petracchi, 2000; Schoech, 2000). Apparently, before the internet-based course begins, students do not know what to expect and are a little apprehensive and even anxious about their ability to cope with such a course (Jegede & Kirkwood, 1992)). However, as they gain experience and become familiar with internet-based learning, students become more confident and at home with the e-learning methodology and this experience in turn promotes more positive attitudes towards the internet-based methodology.

Conclusion

Results of the present study apparently indicate that students who studied via the medium of traditional lecture-based methodology were more at home and satisfied with their studies than students who experienced internet-based methodology. On the other hand students who participated in the internet-based course attained levels of achievement that were similar to or surpassed those of students who participated in a lecture-based course.

This finding seems to indicate that as time passes and students become more familiar with internet-based methodology, their attitudinal levels toward teaching and learning as well as toward satisfaction may well improve and justify a transfer to mass use of internet-based instructional and learning methodology, especially as their achievement levels are little different from those of students who participate in traditional style courses.

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Mr Yaacov B Yablon is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Education. He specializes in information and communication technology in education. Professor Yaacov J Katz serves as Director of the School of Education. He specializes in the psycho-pedagogical aspects of education using information and communication technology.