Anelise Sabbag (California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo), Nicola Justice (Pacific Lutheran University), Lauren Laundroche (California Polytechnic State University), Samuel Frame (California Polytechnic State University)
Abstract
Background
One of the biggest challenges in teaching online asynchronous courses is creating opportunities for students to experience the collaborative interactions that occur in well-designed face-to-face classrooms. Collaborative work that encourages students to interact with each other in online classes can create a sense of community and facilitate the learning process (e.g., Everson & Garfield, 2008; Mills & Raju, 2011). Recommendations for statistics education encourage the use of real-time online discussions (Summers et al., 2005), however, many online courses are delivered asynchronously, making real-time discussions unfeasible. Collaborative keys (CKs; Sabbag & Frame, 2021) are a strictly scaffolded tool that draws from Cooperative Learning principles (Johnson, Johnson, & Stanne, 2000) and may offer a meaningful way for students in asynchronous online courses to experience collaborative work and a sense of community. This study seeks to explore how introductory statistics students interact with one another while using the CK tool, as well as to investigate how participation in CKs appears to be related to student engagement, performance, and attitudes toward statistics.
Methods
We adapted an online discussion framework, Communities of Inquiry (CoI; e.g., Rourke et al.1999; Garrison et al. 2000, 2001; Akyol and Garrison 2013), to measure various aspects of participation in CKs. Currently, we are qualitatively coding students’ contributions to the CK assignments using the CoI framework to better understand how students work together on CKs. We will examine patterns in student participation, and look for relationships between participation, achievement (using the REALI Instrument; Sabbag, Garfield, & Zieffler, 2018) and attitudes (using SATS-36; Schau & Emmioğlu 2012), with LOCUS (Jacobbe et al. 2014) scores as a measure of prior statistical knowledge.
Implications
Our research will help us better understand the extent to which the CK tool can enhance the quality of online statistics education, and the conditions under which various types of group interactions between students appear to be associated with achievement and improved attitudes towards statistics when using the tool. In addition, results will inform ways that principles of cooperative learning can be incorporated into virtual modes of learning, and the pedagogical approaches that enhance the experiences of students in online statistics courses.