دانلود رایگان مقاله اندازه گیری اثر سیستم پاسخ مخاطبان بر عملکرد تحصیلی

Abstract

An increasing number of studies have addressed the impact of Audience Response Systems (ARS) on academic performance at all stages of education, although the evidence does not seem conclusive. With the aim of shedding light on the extent and diversity of the research outcomes, we conduct a meta-analysis of studies worldwide on this topic to assess whether the exam scores of students included in ARS experiments achieve better results than others taught using more conventional teaching tools. From an initial sample of 254 studies, data from 51 papers published between 2008 and 2012 (involving 14,963 participants) that set academic quality criteria, were extracted and analyzed following technical protocols for meta-analyses. Their high degree of heterogeneity shows that the effect of ARS on exam scores seems to be moderated by specific features. So, through a random-effects model, our results provide a positive, although moderated pooled effect of ARS on examination scores that is much greater in experiments performed in non-university contexts (Hedges' g = 0.48; S.E. = .2665) than at the university level (Hedge's g = 0.22, S.E. = .0434). Specifically, the categories of university disciplines in which ARS interventions are implemented seem to influence their usefulness for achieving better academic marks, being more effective when either Pure Soft Sciences or Applied Hard Sciences are considered. These findings might provide guidance for governments, researchers and educators into the effectiveness of learning based on the new interactive technologies.

4. Conclusions

Technological advances have overcome the main barrier to the widespread introduction of ARS into classrooms. Wi-Fi on the majority of campuses in a large number of countries, combined with the mass consumption of smartphones by young people, means that implementing ARS is not a utopia but a reasonable scenario. In this new context, it makes sense to synthesize quantitatively all recent evaluations of the impact of these devices on academic performance. Our paper specifically offers the most complete meta-analysis to date of studies of the effectiveness of audience response systems at all stages of education. From 254 initial studies, our meta-analysis focuses on a sample of 51 papers that conform to both the formal (e.g., the reputation of the journal in which the results are published) and the underlying (e.g., studies that apply a rigorous methodology and carry out the experiment with a control group) academic quality criteria set. The high degree of heterogeneity found for the sample as a whole (see Table 2) shows that the effect of ARS on academic performance seems to be moderated by the characteristics of the different combinations of subjects, especially by the educational environment into which ARS are introduced. A clearly significant effect (at 1% and positive) can be seen in both university and non-university studies. However, the effect is evidently much greater in experiments performed in nonuniversity contexts, with a 0.48 Hedges' g statistic that is very close to the 0.5 threshold that would allow us to speak of an effect in the Cohen scale “middle band” (see Table 3). On the other hand, the 0.22 value for the university level statistic (see Table 3) implies an effect which, despite being highly significant, is not so great and is marked by the high heterogeneity of the combination of subjects.