Christopher A. Sanchez
Proposed research abstract
Learners often struggle to form a well-developed and deep understanding of domain material; an unfortunate fact that can serve as a significant barrier to their future studies and eventual success within a given field. The current proposal seeks funding to develop a set of simple, low-cost, interventions to be used within an existing online 300-level PSY course to help students better enrich their understanding. Importantly, these interventions will provide students with the opportunity to demonstrate their own understanding of the material, and then contrast this understanding in useful and productive ways to more expert-level representations. As has been suggested previously in the literature, this kind of cognitive bootstrapping does help low-knowledge learners gain more appropriate understanding of material, and it is hoped that the proposed intervention will help online students, in particular, with learning relevant course content. To evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention, course performance and attitudes will be compared across sections that either use the planned intervention, or not. Performance will also be compared across Ecampus and in-person sections of the same course to further examine whether the efficacy of these exercises is especially useful in online instructional environments. The results of the proposed intervention should be of broad interest to multiple audiences that are interested in online education, and it is anticipated that any conclusions derived from the current proposal will be well received by the research community, and may be useful for future efforts at securing external funding.
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