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Reproducible High Reading Participation and Auto-Graded Homework Completion across Multiple Cohorts When Using an Interactive Textbook for Material and Energy Balances

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Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

Chemical Engineering Division (ChED) Technical Session 6: First-Year & Sophomore Year Curriculum

Tagged Division

Chemical Engineering Division (ChED)

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

15

DOI

10.18260/1-2--44109

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/44109

Download Count

105

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Paper Authors

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Samantha Yanosko

biography

Matthew W. Liberatore The University of Toledo Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-5495-7145

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Matthew W. Liberatore is a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Toledo. He earned a B.S. degree from the University of Illinois Chicago and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all in chemical engineering. From 2005 to 2015, he served on the faculty at the Colorado School of Mines. In 2018, he served as an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. His research involves the rheology of complex fluids, especially traditional and renewable energy fluids and materials, polymers, and colloids. His educational interests include developing problems from YouTube videos, active learning, learning analytics, and interactive textbooks. His interactive textbooks for Material and Energy Balances, Spreadsheets, and Thermodynamics are available from zyBooks.com. His website is: https://www.utoledo.edu/engineering/chemical-engineering/liberatore/

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Abstract

Interactive textbooks paired with online homework generate big data that can help answer questions about student engagement and learning. Here, a fully interactive textbook for a material and energy balances course measured over 1,300 reading interactions per student per cohort. In addition, several hundred auto-graded homework questions were assigned to students each semester. The auto-grading allowed for individual or class-level interventions to occur in real time and not after the next quiz or exam. In total, seven cohorts representing over 600 students and over 700,000 reading interactions are aggregated, which expands upon previous publications. For example, median reading participation was over 93% for all seven cohorts. In aggregate, female students completed reading participation at a higher rate than male students with statistical significance. Thus, applying some learning best practices including visuals and chunking in animations, immediate feedback in learning questions, and varying the interactive reading activities quantitatively engaged all learners, but showed even higher engagement with female students – an underrepresented group in engineering. Next, analytics from over 130,000 auto-graded problems are examined. Median correct of 91% or higher was found across six cohorts. Thus, allowing unlimited attempts on these formative problems allows students to persist in answering the randomized questions correctly. As with reading participation, female students completed a greater percentage of auto-graded problems than male students, however, statistical significance was not found for auto-graded problems. Overall, few articles in engineering education present data where an underrepresented group, female students in this case, outperform the majority group. While reasons for the differences are speculative at this point, we hope this contribution stimulates other qualitative and quantitative research on gender differences and educational technology.

Yanosko, S., & Liberatore, M. W. (2023, June), Reproducible High Reading Participation and Auto-Graded Homework Completion across Multiple Cohorts When Using an Interactive Textbook for Material and Energy Balances Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--44109

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