This study investigates the effects of collaboration and competition on students' learning performance in a course of business statistics. The collaboration involved a simultaneously organised group competition project with analysis of real-life business problems among students. Students from the following schools participated: JAMK University of…

Cooperative learning has many pedagogical benefits. However, if the cooperative learning teams become ineffective, these benefits are lost. Accordingly, this study developed a computer-aided assessment method for identifying ineffective teams at their early stage of dysfunction by using the Mahalanobis distance metric to examine the difference…

Peer assessment typically requires students to judge peers' work against assessment criteria. We tested an alternative approach in which students judged pairs of scripts against one another in the absence of assessment criteria. First year mathematics undergraduates (N?=?194) sat a written test on conceptual understanding of multivariable…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of a traditional lecture-based curriculum versus a modified "flipped classroom" curriculum of cardiovascular, respiratory, and renal physiology delivered to first-year graduate students. Students in both courses were provided the same notes and recorded lectures. Students in the…

The main purpose of this study was to examine the effects of Problem-Solving Strategy Steps (PSSS) on students' achievement, skill, and confidence. The study was conducted in a two-year college classroom with 70 students from two different groups enrolled in a physics course. One of them was randomly selected as an experimental group (EG) and the…

Learning technical computing skills is increasingly important in our technology driven society. However, learning technical skills in information systems (IS) courses can be difficult. More than 20 percent of students in some technical courses may dropout or fail. Unfortunately, little is known about students' perceptions of the difficulty of…

Since 2004-05 first year students at the School of Environmental Sciences, Ulster University have engaged with senior student tutors (SSTs) in workshop activities aimed at preparations for their written examinations. Using a pedagogical action research methodology we evaluated the role of SSTs in bridging the experiential learning gap between…

In this study, we investigated why Laotian students had a low score, when they were tested by the Force Concept Inventory (FCI). About 400 first year university students answered the FCI or a Lao version of the FCI (LFCI) with the contexts of some questions changed. The students answered a questionnaire and 34 of the students were interviewed. The…

The focus of the current study is to understand which unique features of an immersive virtual reality environment have the potential to improve learning relative motion concepts. Thirty-seven undergraduate students learned relative motion concepts using computer simulation either in immersive virtual environment (IVE) or non-immersive desktop…

This paper reviews the literature on comparing online and paper course evaluations in higher education and provides a case study of a very large randomised trial on the topic. It presents a mixed but generally optimistic picture of online course evaluations with respect to response rates, what they indicate, and how to increase them. The paper…

In much of the world, the issue of accountability and measurement of educational outcomes is highly controversial. Exit testing is part of the movement to ascertain what students have learned and hold institutions and teachers to account. However, compared to the large number of teacher washback studies, learner washback research is lacking…

This quantitative study conducted in the ESL program at a large community college investigated the symbiotic relationship between reading and second-language learning from the perspective of the class of post-secondary functional bilinguals sometimes referred to as Generation 1.5. These students are long-term, resident second-language (L2) English…

This paper contains results of an empirical study that tested the efficacy and acceptability of two templates designed to fully involve students in proper and fair peer-assessments of their group project work (GPW) by providing concrete evidence of independent progressive documentation of their peers' contributions to the work-process and…

The newly developed computerized Constructive Multiple-choice Testing system is introduced. The system combines short answer (SA) and multiple-choice (MC) formats by asking examinees to respond to the same question twice, first in the SA format, and then in the MC format. This manipulation was employed to collect information about the two…

Questionnaire instruments are routinely translated to digital administration systems; however, few studies have compared the differential effects of these administrative methods, and fewer yet in authentic contexts-of-use. In this study, 326 university students were randomly assigned to one of two administration conditions, paper-based (PBA) or…