Introduction
The purpose of this study is to inspect students’ engagement by using blogs. Therefore, students’ performance on blogs is compared with the performance on paper assignments. In this study, students are required to submit their works on blogs throughout the first half of the semester and submit their works on paper throughout the other half.
Blogs, also known as weblogs, are described as a frequent publication of individual thoughts, done in a chorological order (MarketingTerms.com, 2006). As stated by Price &Starkov (2006) travellers are the common bloggers. They use blogs to post their experiences and activities during their trips. Blogs are very useful as a marketing tool in a hospitality organization Price &Starkov (2006).
Journal Address
http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/hlst/documents/johlste/vol10no1/09PP282CobanogluBerezina99to105.pdf
Literature Review
As defined by Natriello (1984), student engagement students’ participating activities in the school program.
The usual way of measuring students’ engagement is via the information reported by the students themselves (Chapman, 2003). Other than that, students’ engagement can be measured by observations, work samples and case studies.
Nevertheless, only a few studies have been done on the influence of technology-based system on students’ engagement, compared with the number of words used in a paper assignment. Thereforethe hypothesis: students’ engagement level as measured by the number of words used between a paper assignment and a blog assignment is prominently different.
Use of blogs in education
Since many students feel more comfortable using blogs for learning, many instructors started using blog. According to Henry Farrell, there are five major uses for blogs in education such as:
1. Teachers use blogs to replace the standard class web page.
2. Instructors begin to link to Internet items that relate to their course.
3. Blogs are used to organise in-class discussions.
4. Some instructors are using blogs to organise class seminars and to provide summaries of readings.
5. Students may be asked to write their own blogs as part of their course grade.
Undergraduate students in the North-East of United States of America.
52 undergraduate students of advanced level hospitality technology module in one of the universities in the North-East of the USA took part in this experiment during spring semester 2009. They were asked to read an article on hospitality technology and write a one paragraph summary ever week and post it on a blog that they must create. They must also read and comment on other participant’s blogs. Besides that, all participants are allowed to post extra articles on the same topic.
The researcher (instructor) conducted the qualitative (content) analysis of participant’s submissions and the number of words used was taken as a measurement of student engagement.
They collected the following data:
1. Number of words used to summarise the article - PAPER
2. Number of words used to summarise the article – BLOG
3. Number of words used in the reflection – PAPER
4. Number of words used in the reflection - BLOG
5. Number of extra article critique submissions – PAPER
6. Number of extra article critique submissions – BLOG
Demographic Characteristics
Demographic Characteristics
About 36% of the Northeast American University students were male and 64% female. 65.4% were forth year students, 23& were third year students, and 11.5% were second year students. All students were asked to reveal their grade point averages. About 20% of the respondents had a GPA over 3.5, 40% between 3.1 and 3.5, and 36% between 2.6 and 3.0.
Hypothesis can be tested by calculating mean scores for blog and paper assignments. The mean number of words used to summarize the article in the paper assignment was 55 and 71.9 words for the blog assignment. Students used 65.90 words to write the reflection part of the article assignment when they submitted it in paper format and 86.2 words in the blog platform. The instructor claimed that some of the blog postings were posted just for the sake of completing the assignment.
Intellectual discussions and high level thinking were not used by the students. However, some of the student’s postings established critical thinking and some of the comments posted to other students’ blog showed a high level of intellectual discussion.
Apparently the participants in this study participate and come up with more words when posting assignments on a blog rather than on paper probably because technology-based assignments are more fun and interactive. Also, due to social pressure where the blog is made public and students are supposed to comment on each other’s posts.
Among the recommendations the researchers brought forward are instructors should create a non-graded test blog assignment to build up students’ confidence, offer rewards like extra marks to motivate students since they mentioned that if credit was not given, they would not do the assignment and instructors should use blogs as a medium for discussion outside the classroom.
The limitation to this study was the sample size. Since the researchers only used one class for sample, the results cannot be generalized to represent entire college population in the USA. A larger sample should be used in future replication of this study to gain a more general result and can include international participants. Also, including students of different classes and different disciplines in the study, as well as considering other variables when measuring the assignment like quality of the assignment.
Students are interested in this kind of assignment because it involves technology, something that is close to young people in general. But we cannot generalize the result of this research due to its small sample and this research only covers undergraduate students in the North-East of United States of America.
However, researchers who are interested in this area of study can replicate with a larger sample in order to further investigate the impact of the use of blogs on students’ assignment engagement.
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