Practicing Connections: Exploring the Impact of a Core-Concept Intervention on Student Learning in Introductory Statistics

Developing students' transferable knowledge is a primary goal of education. In complex domains such as statistics, however, students often develop brittle and inflexible understanding that does not transfer successfully to real world problems or new contexts. This dissertation explores one approach to facilitating students' development of transferable knowledge. Guided by the "practicing connections" framework (Fries et al., 2020), I start with the assumption that for knowledge to transfer it must be coherent. Then, I implement and test a core-concept intervention designed to produce more coherent knowledge by making explicit, for students, the connections between specific content and the coherent domain structure. Students in two ten-week introductory statistics classes (N=526) were randomly assigned, within class, to either receive the intervention, delivered as a series of 24 instructional videos embedded in their textbook, or not. All students used a new research-instrumented, interactive online textbook, "Coursekata Statistics and Data Science: A Modeling Approach," capable of interleaving video, R-coding exercises, text, and assessment items. A series of 9 baseline videos were presented to students in both conditions, allowing for comparison of general video watching behavior across conditions. Within class, all instruction and assessment other than the intervention was identical across conditions; across classes, in-class instruction and assessment differed. Results from Study 1 reveal that students did not watch much of the embedded videos: students' average proportion watched across videos hovered around 0.30, regardless of number of videos available or type of video presented (baseline vs. intervention). No overall effect of condition on transfer or course learning assessments emerged. However, a positive relationship does appear between the minutes of intervention videos watched, controlling for prior knowledge, and students' performance on the final two sets of textbook chapter review questions that assess cumulative learning in novel contexts. When also controlling for minutes of baseline videos watched, the results are a bit more mixed, but still positive. Study 2 largely replicates the findings of Study 1: students watched overall lower, but similar, amounts of video across conditions, and the positive learning gains associated with intervention video watching persist in this sample. While the effect sizes are small, in the order of 1-3 percentage point score increases for every ten minutes of video watched, these results suggest that they are nevertheless robust across different instructors and samples. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]