Educators/researchers in the field of science education research, can you share some tips how you analyze the pre-/post-test survey data? Thanks in advance.
There are lots of ways and it depends on lots of aspects of the models underlying the data. Here is an example showing how the allocation mechanisms informs the choice (Article Allocation to groups: Examples of Lord's paradox
). You will need to provide much more information before you get any non-trolls providing concrete advice. (Note: you may get people telling you what to do, but without further information it is unclear why they are doing this).
Thank you, Dr. Daniel Wright for your " Allocation to groups: Examples of Lord's Paradox" article. It is a great contribution! Thanks for sharing.
My apologies for not clarifying the context. We have been implementing "active learning in-class activities" in addition to the traditional lectures, in a high enrollment science course (sophomore level), for the last 10 years or so. Pre-and post lecture quizzes have been also administered to calculate students' learning gains. We think these data carry some messages and are publishable. We are here seeking out tips from you and other researchers for the data analysis. Thanks again.
Thanks Joshua O. Ighalo for your interest. This topic must be of interest to many of us, who are pursuing career in academics, as well as to those outside. Welcome aboard!
Hi Madhav Nepal, how were the students allocated into the active learning courses? Were the pre- and post- assessments standardized? How many classes in total (and I assume as sophomore level classes these will have a good number of people in each)? It sounds like some form of multilevel model might be useful (after standard cleaning, like dealing with students taking it twice, dropping the course, transfers, missing values, test quality, etc.), the type would be dependent on some of the answers to these questions.
Dear Daniel Wright , I started teaching this course (with 67 students [one lecture and 3 labs] ) 10 years ago. That time I inherited lecture PowerPoint slides from my predecessor and taught the course for the next two years, using the same approach she used, but added semester-wide pre-/post- surveys to measure overall student learning gains. Semester-wide survey questions are standardized for general education Natural science course, and the same questions were used in another freshman level Natural Science course. For the next eight years, I have been adding each year one active learning method and administering online pre-/post- lecture quizzes consistently. The same semester-wide pre-/and post- tests have been also administered to calculate the students' learning gains. The student number in the lecture has now increased to 180 (divided into seven lab sections). The detail may not be clear here and will share with you in the personal messages if needed. I will read your paper first, and let you know if I need further help. Thank you again for all the help.
Do you have a comparison with an alternative teaching method for the same course?
Not exactly! I have the semester-wide pre-/post- semester survey before implementing the active learning activities. Generally learning gains are higher for the recent cohorts compared to that before implementing the "active learning " activities.
Sounds like you'd have difficulty differentiating any effects do to the active learning from cohort effects or your own teaching experience. There are pretty set guidelines for evaluating things like this in education (e.g., https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/referenceresources/wwc_standards_handbook_v4.pdf). Might be possible to argue that if only the scores for certain modules increase and only in the year following their introduction that this might suggest a cause.
You got it, Daniel!! I will go over the guidelines. Thank you so much for taking time providing me these resources.
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