Creating, Automating, and Assessing Online Homework in Introductory Statistics and Mathematics Classes

• Activity Number: 567
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Karen Santoro*+ and Roger Bilisoly
• Companies: Central Connecticut State University and Central Connecticut State University
• Keywords: Statistics education ; Computer-based assessment ; Course management system ; Mathematica

Abstract

Although textbook publishers offer course management systems, they do so to promote brand loyalty, and while an open source tool such as WeBWorK is promising, it requires administrative and IT buy-in. So supported in part by a College Access Challenge Grant from the Department of Education, we collaborated with other instructors to create online homework sets for three classes: Elementary Algebra, Intermediate Algebra, and Statistics for Behavior Sciences I. After experimentation, some of these question pools are now created by Mathematica programs that can generate data sets from specified distributions, generate random polynomials that factor in a given way, create image files of function plots, histograms, scatterplots, and so forth. These programs produce files can be read by the Respondus software package, which then uploads the questions into Blackboard Learn. We end our talk with a summary of several semesters' worth of student performance data along with lessons learned over the years we have worked on this project.