The Latest Research Results of Educational Evaluation From the Faculty of SOE

WANG Shuai, Associate Professor from the School of Education (SOE), has published two papers in “Higher Education” and “Journal of Computing in Higher Education”, both of which are top peer-reviewed academic journals covering educational developments.

In his article “Encouraging impacts of an Open Education Resource Degree Initiative on college students’ progress to degree”, published in “Higher Education”, it focuses on undergraduate teaching, and by far is the largest evaluation study on Open Education Resources (OER) (such as open teaching materials, courseware, etc.) in the United States. Overall, Professor Wang found a positive effect of OER degrees on credit accumulation and no significant difference on cumulative GPA. Taken together, these results suggest students are maintaining their GPAs despite taking more courses, on average. This suggests that students taking OER courses were making faster progress towards degrees than their peers who took no OER courses.

In “An evaluation of a first-of-its-kind hybrid law degree program”, Professor Wang dig into a hybrid Juris Doctorate (J.D.) program launched by a Midwestern institution, the first ABA-accredited law degree program with a substantial online learning component. This study takes a mixed methods approach (both quantitative and qualitative) to evaluate student outcomes and the extent to which the hybrid program expands access to legal education. The study compares student outcomes in the hybrid program with full-time and part-time traditional, in-person programs at the same institution. After three terms of data collection, findings suggest that student outcomes and engagement are comparable across formats when controlling for student background characteristics and prior achievement. This paper provides a strong empirical basis for the effectiveness of online teaching for liberal arts graduate students, which is of significance while the pandemic is still raging across the world.

Download Papers Mentioned Above:

1. Encouraging Impacts of an Open Education Resource Degree Initiative on College Students’ Progress to Degree

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-022-00817-9

2. An Evaluation of a First-of-its-kind Hybrid Law Degree Program

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12528-022-09308-3

Written and Edited by: CHEN Ruoxi