Omdat de George Washington Universiteit voor een verlenging van hun contract met iTunes U stond, wilde men weten welke invloed de podcasts hadden op de studenten, zowel qua leereffecten als qua engagement.
Men bestudeerde in de herfst van 2009 262 studenten in de zelfde doelgroep. Het antwoord is niet eenduidig, het blijkt zeer af te hangen van de leerstijl, geslacht en de motivatie van de studenten:
“If your goal is to find a magic bullet that makes all students better, this isn’t it,” stelt Hugh Agnew, die les gaf in de onderzochte cursus. “But If your goal is to reach some students better that maybe you aren’t reaching so terribly well, then I think this is worth trying.”
Er was geen significant verschil merkbaar in de eindresultaten over de hele groep, maar in subgroepjes bleek het wel verschil te maken. Wat zijn de belangrijkste resultaten:
- Podcasts grab attention and maintain it.
- Students conceptually understood the content, not just remembered it, and the scale of understanding seemed to tip toward the podcasts.
- The students who said they weren’t that motivated at the beginning of the class scored higher on the test when they listened to the podcasts.
- Guys improved their results from the pre-test to the post-test more with the podcasts. But the women’s results showed no difference.
- From the beginning of the research to the end, the number of students who preferred podcasts nearly tripled, jumping from 21 to 62.
- In general, no one saw a dramatic uptick in results with the text or the podcasts. If they did the work, they did better on the test, he said.
(bron)