Article pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Student Success in Intensive versus Traditional Introductory College Chemistry Courses Mildred V. Hall,† Linda A. Wilson,‡ and Michael J. Sanger*,‡ †
Clark State Community College, Springfield, Ohio 45505, United States Department of Chemistry, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tennessee 37132, United States
‡
S Supporting Information *
ABSTRACT: The goal of this study was to determine whether students would be more successful in a traditional 15-week introductory college chemistry course or an intensive three-week version of the same course. In addition to course format, we also analyzed whether the students’ academic experience (measured as the number of college credit hours taken by these students), life experience (measured as the number of years since the student graduated from high school), academic major (categorized as physical science, life science, or nonscience), and gender had an effect on their success in the class. The results of this study showed that, once corrected for student academic ability, students in the intensive course were more successful in this course than the students in the equivalent traditional course. However, we were unable to show that academic experience, life experience, academic major, or gender had any significant effect on student success in these courses. KEYWORDS: First-Year Undergraduate/General, Chemical Education Research, Distance Learning/Self Instruction, Constructivism, Nonmajor Courses FEATURE: Chemical Education Research
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ntensive courses, defined as courses equivalent to semesteror quarter-long courses yet offered in a compressed time format, are widely taught in a variety of disciplines. Several research studies have investigated the factors affecting student success in the intensive versus traditional course format.1−17 Student success in intensive courses has been studied using a variety of measures (course grades, test grades, pretest−posttest differences, scores on standardized tests, etc.), in a wide variety of disciplines, student populations, and institutions. The majority of these studies have shown that student success is significantly greater in the intensive version of the course; most of the rest of these studies found no difference in student success between the intensive and traditional courses. Additionally, one of the larger studies found that the withdrawal rate was significantly lower in intensive courses.7 While one study (reported in a metaanalysis done by Scott and Conrad) found greater success rates for the traditional courses, all other data support the conclusion reported in 1991 by Scott and Conrad15 that “intensive courses seem to be effective alternatives to traditional-length classes regardless of format, degree of intensity, discipline, or field of study.” The existing research on intensive courses has shown that motivation, academic experience, life experience, and gender are potential factors affecting student success in traditional versus intensive courses. Students taking intensive courses tend to be slightly older and working students, with slightly higher GPA than students in traditional courses.8,9 This suggests that they might be more highly motivated to succeed. While Fall’s study6 indicated that student motivation is positively related to academic performance, Seamon3 found no difference in motivational levels of students in the two types of courses. The number of completed semester hours has not been found to be correlated with greater success in intensive courses.8,13 © 2012 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
Age, on the other hand (referred to as life experience in this study), was shown to be a positive factor for success in intensive courses in several studies,5,12 but was found to be a greater factor in traditional courses in one of the studies.7 Both male and female students tend to achieve greater academic success in the intensive format than in traditional courses, but the effect of gender on student success in these studies has produced mixed results.6,7,13,17 Although several studies have been conducted to compare student success in traditional versus intensive courses, most have focused on liberal arts topics such as economics, education, journalism, and psychology. Only one study7 looked at chemistry courses, and this study contained a metaanalysis of results from intensive classes from 50 different disciplines at Santa Monica College (of which chemistry was only one). Also, that study did not investigate other variables such as academic and life experience or gender, which could affect these results. While several articles published in this Journal have focused on evaluating and improving student success,18−21 none of these have looked at the effects of intensive courses. Our study was prompted by the second author, a professor at a large southeastern university who regularly taught an introductory general chemistry course as a traditional 15week course each fall and again as an intensive three-week session each summer. She observed that the students in the intensive course seemed to earn higher grades than the students in the traditional course. The professor gathered data for four academic years, administering the same pretest, using the same lecture materials, and creating matched tests for the two courses each academic year. These data, along with data gathered from Published: June 25, 2012 1109
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student records, were analyzed by the first author as part of her doctoral dissertation under the direction of the last two authors.
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(physical science majors, life science majors, and nonscience majors). Dependent Variable
METHODOLOGY
As part of the first author’s dissertation,22 we collected data on three different student success measures. These included the students’ final examination scores, the total points earned in the course, and a posttest score based on the 24 questions asked in the pretest. For this study, we chose to use the total points earned by the students in this course as the dependent variable because it represents their ultimate success in this course. These data include measures of students’ content knowledge (unit tests and the final) and measures of their general commitment to attend and participate in this class (lab reports and attendance points) in order to be successful in completing this course. Another work23 addresses the final examination and posttest scores; these measures were chosen to compare students’ chemistry content knowledge only. The 800 total points for this class consisted of 400 points for the five tests (100 points each, with the lowest or missing test dropped), 200 points for the final examination, 200 points for the stand-alone laboratory work, with 15 bonus points available for attendance. The midterm tests and the final examinations were identical for all four years and were constructed and used in these classes well before this experiment was conducted. Students were allowed to view these examinations in the presence of the instructor, but were never allowed to keep them. The examinations consisted of multiple-choice questions, some of which were conceptual in nature while others involved mathematical calculations.
Subjects
Student academic records, including course data and student records information, were collected for students enrolled in the fall and summer sections of the same course taught by a single instructor over four academic years. The total initial enrollment for the four fall (traditional) courses was 161, but only 132 finished the classes and took the course finals. The total initial enrollment for the four summer (intensive) courses was 96, but only 89 students took the course finals. Only the students who took the course final were included in this study. Course Formats
The traditional and intensive courses were designed to be equivalent except for the duration of the courses (3 versus 15 weeks). Many things were identical for the two course formats over the four years, including the instructor, the textbook, the total number of contact hours, the course requirements, the course objectives, the classroom dynamics and teaching style, the grading scale, the laboratory experiments, and the midterm and final examinations. In the traditional course, students met for two 85-min lectures and one 3-h lab per week. Each midterm test covered two chapters in the book, and the tests were roughly three weeks apart. In the intensive course, students met for five 150-min lectures and five 3-h laboratories per week. Each midterm test covered two chapters in the book, and the tests were roughly three days apart.
Statistical Analysis
Covariates
The data from the current study were subjected to an ANCOVA analysis24,25 using SYSTAT 10.2, with the total points earned as the dependent variable; course format, academic experience, life experience, academic major, and gender as independent variables; and the pretest scores, GPA, and ACT scores as covariates. Although we were interested in using ACT scores as a covariate in this study, we did not have ACT scores for about one-fourth of the students in this study. While we believe that ACT scores are a solid measure of student prior knowledge and should be included as a covariate, we were concerned that eliminating about 25% of the students could affect the validity of our results. So, we decided to do both comparisons: Table 1 contains the ANCOVA results using ACT scores as a covariate for the 153 students for whom we had ACT scores, and Table 2 contains the ANCOVA results for all 221 students without using ACT scores as a covariate. A power analysis performed using G*Power 3.126,27 showed that the minimum sample size needed to have a power of 0.80 (the commonly accepted standard) was N = 128 for the independent variables with one degree of freedom (course format and gender), N = 158 for the independent variables with two degrees of freedom (life experience and academic major), and N = 196 for academic experience (df = 4). Although the analysis with ACT scores as a covariate may have insufficient power to identify a lack of significant effects for independent variables with more than one degree of freedom owing to insufficient sample size, the analysis without ACT scores as a covariate does have sufficient power to identify a lack of significant effects for all five independent variables studied here. An ANCOVA analysis makes six assumptions about the data: homogeneity of variances, independence of observations, normality of distributions, reliability of measures, parallelism
To correct for any individual student differences, we used three measures of students’ prior knowledge as covariates in the statistical analysis. These three measures were pretest scores from a 24-question multiple-choice pretest given by the instructor during the first class period, GPA, and ACT scores. GPA is an obvious predictor of academic success, but previous research studies have not shown GPA to be strongly associated with success in intensive versus traditional courses.3,5,7,8,13 The Pearson correlation coefficients between the three covariates are all substantially below 0.80 (rACT/GPA = 0.461, rACT/pretest = 0.406, and rGPA/pretest = 0.311). This suggests that the three covariates are accounting for different parts of the variability of the data and warrant the inclusion of all three variables as covariates in this analysis. Independent Variables
The goal of this study was to determine whether five factors (the independent variables) affected student success in the intensive versus the traditional classes. These variables included course format (traditional or intensive), academic experience, life experience, academic major, and gender (male or female). Academic experience was defined in this study as the number of completed semester hours prior to enrolling in this course. This variable was broken into five categories: 0−30 h, 31−60 h, 61− 90 h, 91−120 h, and more than 120 h. Life experience was defined in this study as the number of years since the student had graduated from high school (for the students who had enrolled in this class before graduating from high school, their life experience was negative). This variable was broken into three categories: −1 to 2 years, 3 to 5 years, and more than 5 years. The academic major was split into three categories 1110
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the same results when we included the ACT score as a covariate and dropped about one-fourth of the subjects from the study and when we dropped the ACT score as a covariate and included all of the subjects in the study. In both cases, only the course format variable was significantly associated with student success in this study. The ω2 value,29 a measure of the magnitude of an effect (ef fect size) for the course format was 0.094 when ACT was included and 0.096 when ACT was excluded. These values correspond to a medium effect (a small effect has an ω2 value between 0.01 and 0.06; a large effect has an ω2 value of 0.14 or greater). In both analyses, we did not find a significant effect on student success for the independent variables of academic experience, life experience, academic major, or gender. Although the analysis with ACT scores as a covariate (Table 1) does not have sufficient power to definitely state that life experience, academic major, and academic experience showed no significant effect, the analysis with ACT scores excluded as a covariate (Table 2) does have sufficient power to make these claims. On the basis of the analysis in Table 2, we feel confident in saying that these four independent variables did not have a significant effect on student success in this particular study. Students in the intensive courses performed better than students in the traditional-length courses. Table 3 contains the
Table 1. ANCOVA Results Including ACT Score as a Covariate Source Covariates ACT GPA Pretest Independent Variables Course Format Academic Experience Life Experience Major Gender Error
Degrees of Freedom
Sum of Squares
Mean Square
F Ratios
p Values
1 1 1
41653 302187 15643
41653 302187 15643
13.82 100.23 5.19
0.000a 0.000a 0.024a
1
50713
50713
16.82
0.000b
4
3734
933
0.31
0.871
2
17343
8671
2.88
0.060
2 1 139
8404 88 419080
4202 88 3015
1.39 0.03
0.252 0.865
Values for p ≤ 0.050 indicate a significant effect from these covariates. Values for p ≤ 0.050 indicate a significant difference based on this independent variable.
a b
Table 2. ANCOVA Results Excluding ACT Score as a Covariate Source Covariates GPA Pretest Independent Variables Course Format Academic Experience Life Experience Major Gender Error
Degrees of Freedom 1 1
Sum of Squares
Mean Square
F Ratios
p Values
654032 83717
654032 83717
190.83 24.43
0.000a 0.000a
1
84228
84228
24.58
0.000
4
16805
4201
1.23
0.301
2
19560
9780
2.85
0.060
2 1 208
10036 861 712896
5018 861 3427
1.46 0.25
0.234 0.617
Table 3. Grade Distributions for the Intensive and Traditional Format Courses Final Letter Grade
b
Course Format (N)
A
B
C
D
F
Traditional (132) Intensive (89)
9 17
27 28
43 33
44 11
9 0
distribution of grades earned by the students in the traditional and intensive formats. A χ2 test of homogeneity shows that the grades in these two courses are not homogeneously distributed (χ2 = 25.18, p < 0.000). An analysis of the standardized residuals27 suggests that there are more A students and fewer D students in the intensive group than would be predicted if the grades were distributed homogeneously. At least two possible explanations may account for the superiority of the intensive format over the traditional format relative to student success. One explanation is that something in the intensive format allows students to be more successful in this class; the other is that students in the intensive courses had less time to forget the material compared to the students in the longer, traditional courses. Figure 1 shows a plot of the average scores (listed as percentages) for the total points earned up to and including each of the five tests and the final examination. These data show that the intensive group consistently outperformed the traditional group by about six points, with a slight increase in the difference (eight points) for the final grades. If the time to forget material were the major difference between these two groups, then we would have expected this difference to start small and get consistently larger after each test as the time differential between the two groups grew. The slight increase in the difference between the two groups from the fifth test to the final might be explained by this effect, because the final examination (which was administered to the intensive groups after 3 weeks, but after 15 weeks for the traditional groups) was cumulative.
Values for p ≤ 0.050 indicate a significant effect from these covariates. Values for p ≤ 0.050 indicate a significant difference based on this independent variable.
a b
of regression slopes, and linearity. A posthoc analysis of the two ANCOVA calculations performed here showed that all six assumptions were justified by the data. The results of these tests appear in the online Supporting Information.
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RESULTS AND DISCUSSION On the basis of the ANCOVA results in Tables 1 and 2, all three covariates (ACT scores, GPA, and pretest scores) were significantly associated with student success in this study. Because these three variables were used as a measure of the students’ general academic success, they should affect the students’ success in this specific chemistry course. The ANCOVA calculation controls for the effects of these variables by partitioning out the variation attributed to these covariates,28 so the F and p values reported in Tables 1 and 2 for the five independent variables have already been corrected for the effects of the ACT scores, GPA, and the pretest scores. The results for the five independent variables are the same for both ANCOVA tests. This is encouraging because it shows 1111
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experience, and gender. This study was the first to evaluate how students’ major field of study affected their success in intensive and traditional courses. Because the majority of research studies on intensive courses point to the superiority of intensive courses in enhancing student success compared to traditional-length courses, academic institutions should offer more intensive courses to a broader range of students. Intensive courses would also allow students to take fewer courses at one time and could help them focus on being successful in these fewer areas. This study is the first to compare intensive and traditional courses in the field of chemistry, and we look forward to seeing the results of other chemical education research studies that will further illuminate this complex issue. Additional research looking at long-term retention may be able to address whether the superiority of the intensive group over the traditional group was based on having less time to forget the material discussed in these classes. The effects of motivation on student success for intensive and traditional course formats have been evaluated in other content areas3,6 with mixed results. While this study did not compare the students’ motivations for the two class formats, it should be addressed in future studies involving intensive- and traditional-format chemistry courses.
Figure 1. Mean percentage scores for the total points earned after each unit test and the final examination for the traditional and intensive courses.
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CONCLUSIONS This study showed that, after correcting for student academic ability, students enrolled in an intensive three-week introductory chemistry course had greater academic success in this course than students enrolled in the same course taught over 15 weeks. These results are consistent with several studies in other academic areas1−3,5−7,10,11,13,15,16 showing greater student success in intensive courses, but contradict other studies showing equivalent student success in the two course formats.4,7,14,15,17 Greater student success in intensive courses has been attributed to decreased course fragmentation, increased student−instructor interaction, increased student camaraderie, and greater student satisfaction.1,2,6,8,10,11 There were two characteristics of the intensive courses in this study that may have led to improved student success. The first was the instructional pace: each day in the intensive course covered the same amount of material presented in one week in the traditional course. The second factor was that because these classes met for 5 to 6 h per day for five days per week, these students were less likely to take other courses in the same semester. With an increased pace and fewer classes to serve as distractions, these students may have been able to focus on this course and be more successful. Additional research is needed to confirm or refute these explanations. In this study, we were unable to show that academic experience, life experience (age), academic major, or gender had any effect on student success in the intensive or traditional courses. The results in the literature regarding these factors is limited and mixed. Logan and Geltner8 and Van Scyoc and Gleason13 found that having prior academic experience did not improve student success but Wlodkowski and Kasworm5 found that students with prior academic experience were more likely to succeed in intensive and traditional courses. Geltner and Logan7 reported that older students had more success in traditional courses while Wlodkowski and Kasworm5 and Caskey12 found that older students had more success in intensive courses. Hall et al.,23 in a study complementary to this one, found that life experience was positively associated with students’ chemistry content knowledge. While Kanun et al.17 saw no effect based on gender, Fallon11 reported that females outperformed males in both intensive- and traditional-format courses, and Gleason13 reported that males outperformed females in intensive courses. Our results corroborate the other studies showing no effects based on academic experience, life
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT
S Supporting Information *
Statistical analyses to test the hypotheses associated with performing ANCOVA calculations. This material is available via the Internet at http://pubs.acs.org.
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected].
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to thank Dana Fuller from the Psychology Department, and Toto Sutarso from the Information Technology Division at Middle Tennessee State University, for their helpful suggestions regarding the statistical analyses performed in this study.
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REFERENCES
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