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ASSESSMENT OF THE AMOUNT OF TIME STUDENTS SPEND STUDYING

Abstract

To meet the objectives of accreditation students must learn the material. Each professor teaches a lesson and then assigns homework. When students do their homework there usually is no quantitative way of measuring the amount of time spent on their assignment. Recently, we have used a quantitative method to assess the amount of time a student studies material assigned on the web as homework. The technology now enables us to measure the time spent on studying and to correlate that to the acquisition of the material.

Introduction

I teach physics and mathematics at TCI, The College of Technology. The college has 4000 students and is located in NYC. Accreditation assessment challenges every faculty member. We are continually looking at the outcomes and questioning what steps should be taken to improve the outcomes. Because accreditation is vital to the success of a program poor performance is a hot topic in department meetings. Some standard approaches are; increase homework, hold review session, have peer to peer tutoring. Since we keep rubrics from term to term on each course we can assess the applied corrections by the improvement in outcomes.

At first we made a major video on major topics like the Pythagorean Theory1. This took a considerable amount of work on planning and filming. The outcomes improved from 40% to 55 % we were encouraged. We started to make shorter videos on topics (Find the Inverse of a Matrix, and Plot a Function) We monitor the use of the video on the website by using Google Analytics to measure the number of times students access a video. This provides a quantitative measure of students who are accessing the website.. We could never measure students studying before. Since the technology is now available we have started to make shorter video to illustrate major topics and improve the outcomes of our students in meeting stated objectives

The syllabus of a mathematic course MAT135 College Algebra and Trigonometry lists the chapter topics and the basic equation of Pythagoras a2 +b2 = c2 is the foundation of the course. In 1999 at the ASEE I presented “A Geometrical Proof of Pythagoras Theory” 3 the students are required to derive the proof (shown below in Figure 3) on the first few exams in the course.

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Pariser, B. (2009, June), Assessment Of The Amount Of Time Students Study Paper presented at 2009 Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--5393