Effort and Struggles in the Data: How Do Low and High Achieving Students Use an Online Textbook in an Introductory STEM Course?

Abstract

How students engage with the course material outside of in-class time is often an invisible, but powerful indicator of their motivation, belief, and subsequent achievement. In the current paper, we track how high and low-achieving students in an introductory data science course engage differently with an online textbook. Using log data, we create proxies for the level and type of effort students put into the coursework, and the level of frustration and struggling they experience throughout the semester. Statistical analysis and side-by-side visualizations reveal an increasingly divergent pattern of longer struggles and less effort from low-achieving learners, and also reveals the existence of a watershed week where this divergence becomes especially pronounced. We conclude with discussions on how effort and struggling metrics could be used to support learning and teaching.