Discussion boards, or online asynchronous discussions (OADs), have become increasing popular course tools for university-level engineering courses to support students’ communication and collaboration. Although collaborative OADs are being adopted, and the collaboration they enable holds promise for fostering interest, inclusion and increased retention, there is no easy way to measure discussion quality or its impact on learning.
The goal of this project was to study connections between student discussion constructs and student socio-demographic, background and performance data in undergraduate and graduate STEM courses. The study contains two important thrusts: One investigated retrospective data and the other investigated ongoing student discussion data. We plan to perform the study with large discussion corpora that contains online discussion data from 115 past courses and 4 ongoing courses.
The primary objective of the research work was to evaluate the hypothesis that 1) high student discussion participation significantly impacts performance and retention and 2) that there may be predictable patterns of participation among different student cohorts.
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Investigators, Jihie Kim, Gisele Ragusa and Erin Shaw, University of Southern California