Using the Blackboard Course Management System to Analyze Student Effort and Performance

This paper documents a novel use of the Blackboard course management system to investigate the relationship between student effort and performance. We measure student effort by tracking the number of times students access study resources that have been placed on the Blackboard system and then examine if more frequent access of the resources affects their grade performance. Our results indicate that performance is positively influenced by study effort. A more evenly spaced study schedule also has a positive effect on performance while cramming (i.e., intense studying in a short period of time immediately preceding an exam) does not. Cumulative GPR is found to be positively associated with performance in the course while gender, academic class, or semester credit load appear to have little influence.INTRODUCTIONThis article examines the relationship between students' effort and success in undergraduate financial institutions and markets classes. The Blackboard course management system is used both as the primary method to deliver course content and to measure students' effort. In his national survey, Saunders (2001) found that in-class traditional lecture with instructor-led problem solving was still the dominant teaching and delivery method utilized by undergraduate finance instructors. However, as predicted by Farinella, Hobbs, and Weeks (2000), the cost effective- ness and flexibility of online educational delivery has guaranteed its increased implementation. Blackboard has evolved into the most prominent online course management system for universities (it is also widely used by k-12, government agencies, corporations, and the military) as it can be utilized for a variety of instructional, communication and assessment functions.1A limited number of studies have investigated the effects of students' efforts on their academic performance in finance courses. It can be argued some of the measures used to proxy student effort in these studies were somewhat objective while others were highly subjective. Unlike prior studies that utilized self-reported data or required researcher classification judgments, the measures of student effort used in this study are based on objective observations recorded by Blackboard's statistics tracking feature. This tracking feature can be activated by instructors at their option on any or all study resources they place out on the system. When selected to operate, the system records a "hit" every time a student accesses an educational resource placed out on the system. Thus, utilizing this feature, we were able to view the number of hits by date over the entire course of the semester for each student. We feel that this information on the number of times students viewed the course's educational resources provide a viable, objective measure of student study effort.2Using the tracking feature, we observe the number of times each student accesses select study resources that can only be viewed online. We record the number of times the resources are observed by each student from the previous test up to the day of the test, the number of times the resources are observed the previous ten days prior to each test and the number of times the resources are observed the day prior to and the day of each test. Our analysis reveals a strong positive relationship between the number of times students view the resources and the grade received in the course. This is true whether we use the total observations of the resources since the last test or just the number of observations the ten days prior to each test. On the other hand, we did not find a significant relationship between "cramming" (i.e., intense studying in a short period of time immediately preceding an exam) and the students' grades. Cumulative grade point average is significantly positively related to the course grade and finance and accounting majors performed better than other majors in general. Gender, academic class or semester course credit load did not appear to have a significant influence on the course grade. …