Engaging Students and Changing Academic Achievement with Technology: A Quasi-Experimental Preliminary Investigation

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Can technology engage students and improve their academic achievement? Although numerous examples detail technology’s classroom uses, few studies empirically examine whether technologically oriented pedagogical changes factually lead to positive outcomes. In this pilot study, we used a quasi-experimental design to examine whether a technology enhanced classroom led to increased student engagement and academic achievement. Two features generally characterized the technology enhanced classroom experience: specific feedback generated from recordings of small group discussions and podcasts of class recordings. Technology enhanced classroom students demonstrated statistically significant increases in student engagement and improved academic achievement. These findings support previous efforts to use technology to enhance engagement and achievement among college students, encourage future efforts, and provide intriguing suggestions regarding the psychological underpinnings of the findings.

Stream: Technology in Learning; Maths, Science and Technology Learning

Paper: Engaging Students and Changing Academic Achievement with Technology

I am a quantitative and applied experimental psychologist who pursues two streams of programmatic research. The first uses latent variable models to examine the cross-cultural validity of psychological measures and the effects of measurement bias on public health efforts to understand and eliminate health disparities, particularly among the Hispanic community. This work also seeks to elucidate the causal mechanism that lead to culturally based measurement bias. The second stream of research I conduct examines the application of experimental psychological theories to the science of learning in young adulthood. This work especially focuses on using new technologies to test techniques that should bolster young adults' initial understanding of scientific methods and support students' long term retention and application of scientific thinking throughout adulthood. It additionally seeks to understand the role of young adults' social, emotional, and cognitive development in learning. Both of these foci result in an active research lab that includes undergraduate and graduate research assistants.