Students in the first semester of a general chemistry course at a large southwestern university completed a 3-week homework assignment using Mindtap, a Cengage Learning product.  Mindtap is an electronic product that has homework questions embedded in the text, such that students read a short section of text then answer a question set.  Due to technical difficulties, students were moved to OWL version 1 (Online Web Learning from Cengage Learning) for their next homework sets. The OWL system has the homework questions with a link to the text in a separate window, rather than embedded. With OWL, they completed two 2-week homework assignments. A survey was given after the second OWL homework assignment was completed.  The survey included Likert-scaled and open-response questions dealing with students perceived level of understanding using the different systems, how easy the systems were to use, and the advantages/disadvantages of each system.  At the end of the second semester of general chemistry, the students were given another survey dealing with delayed attitudes towards the systems after using OWL for the second semester.  This presentation will discuss the findings from a 300-person class for the quantitative and qualitative portions of the original survey, plus the delayed survey with recommendations for the future.

Linked text vs. embedded text in two homework systems: Student impressions, attitudes, and perceived learning

248th National Meeting (2014)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.