Browsing by Author "Traxler, Adrienne"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Content analysis of instructor tools for building a learning community
    (American Association of Physics Teachers, 2018-12) Myers, Carissa; Traxler, Adrienne; Gavrin, A.; Physics, School of Science
    This work presents a content analysis of an online discussion forum accompanying a face-to-face introductory physics course. Content analysis is a quantitative method for analyzing text that uses a coding scheme to gain insight into student discussions. We explore the effects of "anchor" tasks, small weekly activities to help students engage with each other. The goal of this analysis was to examine how the distributions of codes are impacted by anchor versus non-anchor tasks, and different types of anchors. The result of this work was that the coding scheme was able to detect some differences between anchor and non-anchor threads, but further work should be done to observe behaviors that would require a more in-depth analysis of the text. This research is significant for physics education research (PER) because there is little PER using content analysis or studying online talk. This is a step towards identifying patterns in conversations between physics students and the tools that may help them have on topic conversations essential for their learning. Identifying such tools can aid instructors in creating effective online learning environments, and this project introduces "anchor" tasks as instructor tools for building a learning community.
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    Networks identify productive forum discussions
    (APS, 2018-07) Traxler, Adrienne; Gavrin, A.; Lindell, Rebecca; Physics, School of Science
    Discussion forums provide a channel for students to engage with peers and course material outside of class, accessible even to commuter and nontraditional populations. Forums can build classroom community and aid learning, but students do not always take up these tools. We use network analysis to compare three semesters of forum logs from an introductory calculus-based physics course. The networks show dense structures of collaboration that differ significantly between semesters, even though aggregate participation statistics remain steady. After characterizing network structure for each semester, we correlate students’ centrality—a numeric measure of network position—with final course grade. Finally, we use a backbone extraction procedure to clean up “noise” in the network and clarify centrality-grade correlations. We find that more central network positions are positively linked with course success in the two semesters with denser forum networks. Centrality is a more reliable indicator of grade than non-network measures such as postcount. Backbone extraction destroys these correlations, suggesting that the noise is in fact signal and further analysis of the discussion transcripts is required.
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    Quantifying the linguistic persistence of high and low performers in an online student forum
    (2019-07) Myers, Carissa; Fox, Elizabeth; Traxler, Adrienne; Gavrin, A.; Physics, School of Science
    This work uses recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) to analyze the online forum discussion between students in an introductory physics course. Previous network and content analysis found differences in student conversations occurring between semesters of data from an introductory physics course; this led us to probe which concepts occur and persist within conversations. RQA is a dynamical systems technique to map the number and structure of repetitions for a time series. We treat the transcript of forum conversations as a time series to investigate and apply RQA techniques to it. We characterize the forum behaviors of high and low scoring students, such as their percentage of recurring topics and persistence of discussing a topic over time. We quantify how high scoring and low scoring students use online discussion forum and test whether different patterns exist for these groups. This work is the first adaptation of recurrence quantification methods from the field of psychology for physics education research. Using RQA, there was not a general, observable difference in how the two different groups, high- and low-scoring students, used the forum; however, there were differences when focusing in on and comparing one high-scoring student and one low-scoring student. This technique has the potential for analyzing other PER data such as interviews or student discussions.