Last modified: 2018-10-29
Abstract
Business Statistics course is a graduation requirement for all undergraduate programs in the College of Business at BSU. A high percentage of failures and poor student’s performance, lack of motivation by students to work consistently throughout the semester, and a pattern of low concept retention led to a redesign in 2014. Before the redesign, the average rate of success in the course, as measured by the proportion of initial enrollees who ultimately achieve a grade of C or better, typically was around 50%, which by all standards was considered low. It is against this backdrop that a transformation initiative was launched by the University to enable a new paradigm of teaching and learning leveraging technology and to adopt new ways to improve teaching and student learning outcomes. The approach utilized in Business Statistics was to modify the mode of course delivery in order to improve the learning outcomes. The key performance outcome measure was the students’ percentage grade at the end of the course. This variable was hypothesized to be affected by students’ demographics, failure rates, grades in specific assignments, amount of efforts spent on reading and practice measured with the performance in Hawkes certification. Non-parametric tests for independent samples was used to find the difference in performance between a control group which was another section of the course taught by another instructor and an experimental group taught by me. The results show that the null hypothesis for both groups are similar no matter the mode of instruction.
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