With support from NSF's Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR) program, this project aims to serve the national interest by enhancing the value of online learning environments. Specifically, the project will develop and implement "tutorial dialogue videos" designed to improve students' learning in online STEM courses. In online classes today, videos are a major medium for the delivery of content. However, most of the videos are presented using a monologue style, such as a presentation delivered by an instructor, along with associated visuals, animations, and related materials. The monologue presentation format leads students to passively engage with what is being said and is less effective for learnito impng than active approaches. To move online courses beyond passive learning experiences, this project will develop and implement a dialogue video format along with an online collaborative learning space. This format will capture tutorial dialogues between an instructor (tutor) and a student (tutee) that contain not only correct information but also misinformation expressed by a struggling tutee. Prior research has shown that such dialogue videos promote deeper learning than monologue videos. The online collaborative learning space will allow students to discuss with peers the content of the dialogue videos. This approach has the potential to be used for improving existing online courses, as well as to inform efforts to develop new courses.
The project involves a translation study based on a decade of laboratory studies conducted in the PI's laboratory as well as the lessons learned from a prior NSF-funded classroom implementation study (NSF Award DUE-1504893). In the new study, the investigators will implement both dialogue and monologue videos in four introductory-level college STEM classes (including General Physics and General Biology) and will compare the effectiveness of the videos in promoting student learning. Using the Interactive-Constructive-Active-Passive (ICAP) theory of engagement, this project will test two hypotheses: (1) Students' learning from the dialogue videos exceeds their learning from the monologue videos. (2) Online dialogue patterns of dialogue observers are more "Constructive" and "Interactive" than those of monologue observers, accounting for the learning benefits of dialogues. A stratified randomized sampling technique will be used, and learning outcome measures (i.e. pre- and post-tests) and process/product measures (i.e. online dialogues and worksheets) will be used to test the hypotheses. The first year of the project will be devoted to the development of the dialogue videos and the online learning space. During the second and third years, two iterations of the implementations and the research activities will take place in college-level STEM courses in multiple disciplines. The implementations and the research findings will not only provide insights into factors that mediate the benefit of dialogue videos but also yield practical guidelines for creating dialogue videos that will have a positive impact on students' learning in STEM fields. NSF's IUSE: EHR program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools, such as the activities proposed by this project.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
