Abstract:
|
At the United States Military Academy, all students take a very robust core curriculum, resulting in many courses with several hundred students enrolled each semester. These core courses are taught with a common curriculum and with common assessments. Additionally, class sizes are limited to 18 or fewer, resulting in dozens of sections in any given semester. This allows for a unique opportunity to assign different "treatments" to different sections. In this study, we aimed to measure the effect of academically homogeneous sections on student performance across course exams. We assigned half of the course to sections based on student GPA, core mathematics GPA, and whether they were placed in the Academy's advanced core calculus curriculum. The other half of the course was assigned randomly. We then measured performance on common exams and surveyed cadets and faculty to determine the overall sentiment and impact of teaching and learning in an academically homogeneous environment. This experiment will help other institutions make decisions on how to best teach undergraduate statistics courses.
|