web usage and learning styles in an academic course moshe leiba rafi nachmias knowledge technology...
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WEB USAGE AND LEARNING STYLES IN AN ACADEMIC COURSE
Moshe Leiba Rafi Nachmias
Knowledge Technology LabScience and Technology Education Center
School of EducationTel-Aviv University
Israel
• Introductory Biology courses contain massive amount
of new concepts and information.
• Many students do poorly or drop out (Belzer, Miller, &
Shoemake, 2003).
The Problem
Purpose• To asses students’ usage of E-learning components
in an academic course.
• To explore the relationship between learning styles
and students’ web usage.
• Web servers record and accumulate data about user
activities.
• There is a large variance among students in viewing
E-learning components, most students used only a
small percentage of the available items, whilst few
students viewed all of them (Nachmias & Shany, 2002;
Nachmias & Segev, 2003).
Web Usage
• Learning styles are defined as “characteristic
cognitive, affective, and psychological behaviors that
serve as relatively stable indicators of how learners
perceive, interact with, and respond to the learning
environment” (Keefe, 1979).
• One learning style is neither preferable nor inferior to
another: these are simply different approaches, with
different characteristic strengths and weaknesses
(Felder & Brent, 2005).
Learning Styles
Felder and Silverman (1988) categorized students into
four dimensions which relate to different aspects of the
learning process:
Visual
Verbal
Sensory
Intuitive
Active
Reflective
Sequential
Global
Input
Perception
Processing
Understanding
Method
• Quantitative methodology.
• Web Mining: process of extracting information
concerning the usage behavior of the users - an
objective and noninvasive research method (Pahl,
2004).
• Participants: 71 bio-medical engineering,
undergraduate students 37 participants (52.1%) were
men and 34 (47.9%) were women.
Data Collection Tools• Log Files
The fields of the log format are: Student’s ID, Content
Item accessed, Time of Access, Posting a Message
and Viewing a Message.
• Index of Learning Styles (ILS)
The ILS questionnaire (Felder & Solomon, 1994)
consists of 44 ‘‘choose A or B’’ items with 11 items
corresponding to each dimension. The score on a
dimension would be an odd number between -11 and
+11.
Data Collection Tools
The CourseAn introductory biology course at Tel-AvivUniversity, Israel in the year 2005.
The students were offered several E-learningcomponents which they were not required to use:
• Presentations • Simulations• Video lectures• Virtual laboratories• E-journals and E-books (E- Resources)• E-papers• E-games• Discussion groups
ResultsWeb usage of E-learning components
Frequency Distribution of Usage
Results
Pe
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ge
of
stu
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Number of simulations
Frequency Usage of Simulations (26)
Results
Number of presentations
Pe
rce
nta
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of
stu
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Frequency Usage of Presentations (16)
Asynchronous discourse
• 60% of the students participated passively.
Results
Types of Activity in the Forums
Forum activity
Pe
rce
nta
ge
of
stu
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Students' learning style preferences
• The individual learning preferences of the students
were Visual, Sensing, Active and Sequential.
Results
SensoryIntuitive
VisualVerbal
ActiveReflective
SequentialGlobal
Correlations between Web usage and learning stylesResults
Conclusions• Students preferred Power Point Presentations by far.
• Large Variability among students in using E-learning
components (Peled & Rashty, 1999).
• The individual learning preferences of the students were
Visual, Sensing, Active and Sequential (Felder & Brent,
2005).
• Students with a Visual preference tended to use more
multimedia items (Zywno, 2003).
• Students categorized as having a Sensing learning
style were more active participants in the online
forums and visited the course Web site more often.
• These findings are not surprising, and are consistent
with the Felder Model construct (Felder & Silverman,
1988).
• Learning Styles explain less than 10% of the Variance.
Conclusions
“I’m an Abstract-Sequential learner. Please conduct yourself accordingly!”
