The Binary Number System

Welcome to Tony Hursh's EdPsy 387 Major Project Report. This page gives an overview of the project design, evaluation, and some preliminary conclusions. Further details are available on subsequent pages.

Project Design

The project was aimed at students taking CS105 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These students often have difficulty learning abstract concepts (such as the binary number system) from traditional textbooks. It was theorized that an online tutorial featuring binary calculators and interactive animations might make the concepts easier to understand. A set of web pages was created and made available to the students (note: an early version of the tutorial was reported not to work under Mac OS X, though it did work under Windows and older versions of the Mac system software. This problem has apparently been rectified.).

Methodology

The perceived usefulness of the tutorial was measured by means of an anonymous questionnaire. The questionnaire was first made available to the author's own course sections, and later to the entire class. The questionnaire results were tabulated, and some simple statistical analysis was performed. The tutorial was rated against the perceived usefulness of the lectures and textbooks in presenting the same material on a 0-10 scale, with 0 being the lowest score. The students were asked whether this tutorial would best be used as a replacement for the textbook, as a supplement to the textbook, or not used at all. They were also asked whether they would enjoy more tutorials of this type.

Four students who submitted blank responses were excluded from the analysis. Students who completed part of the questionnaire were included.

Results

As of December 10, 2001, 27 students have completed the questionnaire. The following figures are the results for all questionnaires received, with the results for the author's sections following in square brackets. The mean score for perceived usefulness of the tutorial was 8.27/10 [8.80/10] (standard deviation 1.61 [1.06]), compared to 7.69/10 [8.07/10] for the lecture (standard deviation 1.78 [1.43]) and 5.52/10 [5.33/10] for the textbook (standard deviation 2.64 [2.84]).

20 of 27 students thought the tutorial would best be used as a supplement for the text. 2 students thought it should replace the text, and 3 students thought the tutorial should not be used at all. Two students chose "other".

21 of 27 students said that they thought more activities of this type would be a useful addition to the course. 3 students answered maybe, and 2 students thought that such activities would not be useful. One student did not answer.

Conclusion

The preliminary results are encouraging, indicating that students find this type of activity useful and would like to see more such activities. Of course, the open question here is whether the activity actually succeeds in teaching the students the concepts. It would be intriguing to compare the scores on related test questions for students who completed the tutorial with those who did not (of course, such research would need adequate safeguards to ensure student confidentiality). Such research would be aided by the course design of CS105. Exams are given on machine-readable scantron forms, which would make quantitative analysis feasible. Another possibility would be to use the programming code already developed to implement a pre- and post-test.

Most students rated the lectures as useful, but student opinion on the textbook was mixed, with a significantly lower mean and a higher standard deviation.

Though the author's own class sections did rate the tutorial somewhat higher than the general class population (perhaps out of loyalty), the results as a whole still seem to be positive.

Impact of the Work

This work has been reviewed by the head professor for the course, and she is incorporating the material into the course curriculum. She is considering adding other activities of this nature to the course.

In addition, the work may have broader implications. A disproportionate number of the subjects stated that they thought the tutorial would best be used as a supplement for the textbook, not as a replacement for it, even though the textbook was rated much lower than either the online tutorial or the lecture. Research conducted by Martin Maurer, another student in EdPsy 387, produced similar results. His subjects also indicated that they thought the Web-based material should supplement, not replace, the textbook. This could be due to the subjects having little experience with online learning. The CS105 students who participated in the Binary Number System experiment are mostly incoming first-year students who might never have participated in this type of activity before. Maurer actually asked his subjects whether they'd taken a Web-based course before. Only 1 of 10 subjects had done so. Though generalizing from such a small sample size is risky, it is intriguing that the single subject in Maurer's study who'd previously taken a Web-based course appeared to be much more willing to replace the text outright. Whether the reluctance of the students in these studies to switch completely to Web-based material is due to unfamiliarity or to genuine advantages of traditional texts is an important question. Further research needs to be done in this area.

Contact Information

Questions and comments about this research are invited. Please send email to: hursh@uiuc.edu