Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

5-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Instructional Design and Development

Committee Chair

Shenghua Zha, Ph.D.

Advisor(s)

Dr. James Van Haneghan, Dr Taralyn McMullan, and Dr. David S. Williams

Abstract

This mixed methods study sought to explore how graduate nursing students engaged with a study guide intervention to determine the relationship between the intervention and students' performance in the end-of-course assessment and their perceptions of cognitive presence and social presence in a fully online graduate evidence-based methods nursing course. This study used a quantitative-driven mixed-methods concurrent research design. The 371 students enrolled in the 28 course sections were invited to participate. 325 students were engaging with the study guide, and 192 responded to the questionnaire. In quantitative analysis, the independent variables in this study were students' responses and views to the study guide intervention. Responses are each answer students give to the questions in the study guide. Views are each time participants view the study guide without leaving any response to the questions. The dependent variables were students' performance in the end-of-course assessment, perceptions of social presence, and cognitive presence. I conducted multiple regression analyses to understand these relationships. The open-ended qualitative data were analyzed with QDA Miner 6 following inductive coding. Finally, the qualitative findings were explained through figures and table to detail the codes that emerged from the qualitative data.

The findings in this study showed that students engaged in the study guide intervention in different ways. The two major behaviors identified were views and responses. In addition to their responses to each question, students added supplemental details to their responses, such as external links, chapter numbers, and author names. Students' engagement peaked at the end of the semester as the end-of-course assessment approached.

The result indicated that there was a significant relationship between the study guide and the student's performance. Students who made more responses had better performance. The effect value was small and only explained 2.8% percentage of the change in the end-of-course assessment performance. However, this aligns with literature that indicates that study guides impact students' performance, regardless of the mode they are produced.

There was no statistically significant relationship between views, responses, and cognitive presence. There was statistical significance between views and cognitive presence. There was statistical significance between views and cognitive presence. However, it was a negative impact indicating that students who had more passive views reported lower cognitive presence. The effect value was small, and it only explained 2.3% percentage of change in the cognitive presence. The literature indicates that students may have stayed in the exploration as they prepared for the end-of-course assessment.

There was no statistically significant relationship between views, responses, and social presence. More research needs to be developed to examine more closely how interventions like the study guide may impact social presence if implemented in a different study setting.

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