Transcript WEB USAGE AND LEARNING STYLES IN AN ACADEMIC

WEB USAGE AND LEARNING STYLES IN AN
ACADEMIC COURSE
Moshe Leiba
Rafi Nachmias
Knowledge Technology Lab
Science and Technology Education Center
School of Education
Tel-Aviv University
Israel
The Problem
• Introductory Biology courses contain massive amount
of new concepts and information.
• Many students do poorly or drop out (Belzer, Miller, &
Shoemake, 2003).
Purpose
• To asses students’ usage of E-learning components
in an academic course.
• To explore the relationship between learning styles
and students’ web usage.
Web Usage
• Web servers record and accumulate data about user
activities.
• There is a large variance among students in viewing
E-learning components, most students used only a
small percentage of the available items, whilst few
students viewed all of them (Nachmias & Shany, 2002;
Nachmias & Segev, 2003).
Learning Styles
• Learning styles are defined as “characteristic
cognitive, affective, and psychological behaviors that
serve as relatively stable indicators of how learners
perceive, interact with, and respond to the learning
environment” (Keefe, 1979).
• One learning style is neither preferable nor inferior to
another: these are simply different approaches, with
different characteristic strengths and weaknesses
(Felder & Brent, 2005).
Felder and Silverman (1988) categorized students into
four dimensions which relate to different aspects of the
learning process:
Visual
Verbal
Input
Sensory
Intuitive
Perception
Active
Reflective
Processing
Sequential
Global
Understanding
Method
• Quantitative methodology.
• Web Mining: process of extracting information
concerning the usage behavior of the users - an
objective and noninvasive research method (Pahl,
2004).
• Participants: 71 bio-medical engineering,
undergraduate students 37 participants (52.1%) were
men and 34 (47.9%) were women.
Data Collection Tools
• Log Files
The fields of the log format are: Student’s ID, Content
Item accessed, Time of Access, Posting a Message
and Viewing a Message.
Data Collection Tools
• Index of Learning Styles (ILS)
The ILS questionnaire (Felder & Solomon, 1994)
consists of 44 ‘‘choose A or B’’ items with 11 items
corresponding to each dimension. The score on a
dimension would be an odd number between -11 and
+11.
The Course
An introductory biology course at Tel-Aviv
University, Israel in the year 2005.
The students were offered several E-learning
components which they were not required to use:
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Presentations
Simulations
Video lectures
Virtual laboratories
E-journals and E-books (E- Resources)
E-papers
E-games
Discussion groups
Results
Web usage of E-learning components
Frequency Distribution of Usage
Results
Percentage of students
Frequency Usage of Simulations (26)
Number of simulations
Results
Percentage of students
Frequency Usage of Presentations (16)
Number of presentations
Results
Asynchronous discourse
Percentage of students
Types of Activity in the Forums
Forum activity
• 60% of the students participated passively.
Results
Students' learning style preferences
• The individual learning preferences of the students
were Visual, Sensing, Active and Sequential.
Verbal
Intuitive
Reflective
Global
Visual
Sensory
Active
Sequential
Results
Correlations between Web usage and learning styles
Conclusions
• Students preferred Power Point Presentations by far.
• Large Variability among students in using E-learning
components (Peled & Rashty, 1999).
• The individual learning preferences of the students
were Visual, Sensing, Active and Sequential (Felder &
Brent, 2005).
Conclusions
• Students with a Visual preference tended to use more
multimedia items (Zywno, 2003).
• Students categorized as having a Sensing learning
style were more active participants in the online
forums and visited the course Web site more often.
• These findings are not surprising, and are consistent
with the Felder Model construct (Felder & Silverman,
1988).
• Learning Styles explain less than 10% of the Variance.
“I’m an Abstract-Sequential learner. Please
conduct yourself accordingly!”
Thank You!
Moshe Leiba
[email protected]
Rafi Nachmias
[email protected]