Assessing the Impact of “Open Pedagogy” on Student Skills Mastery in First-Year Composition

Matthew Bloom

doi:10.5944/openpraxis.11.4.1025

Abstract

This article presents the results of a 2016 classroom research study assessing the impact of open pedagogy on student skills mastery in English 101, a first-year undergraduate composition course at a two-year community college in North America. Ninety-two students in five sections used the same free OER course materials, but two sections were given traditional assignments (i.e. formal essays and grammar exercises) and the other three sections were given “open” assignments that involved designing and remixing open resources. Assignment results and other course metrics used to investigate the impact on student skills mastery yielded no statistically significant differences in performance between the student groups, which suggests that there may be no harm in shifting away from the traditional “disposable” assignment.

Highlights

‘Open educational resources’ (OER) are digital teaching materials that are either in the public domain or explicitly licensed for certain kinds of reuse, remixing, and redistribution
While scholarly research into the impact of OER adoption has deepened, the open content movement has begun a shift towards examining the ways that open pedagogy may or may not impact student success
It is important to note that recently, Wiley and Hilton (2018) connected the use of the term ‘open pedagogy’ back to exploratory and collaborative learning practices dating back decades, and argued for the use of the term ‘OER-enabled pedagogy’ to describe the practices “only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions which are characteristic of OER,” such as those outlined above

Summary

Introduction

‘Open educational resources’ (OER) are digital teaching materials that are either in the public domain or explicitly licensed for certain kinds of reuse, remixing, and redistribution. In the last few years, the discussion of what possibilities emerge for teaching and learning when students are able to interact with remixable open content has begun to occupy the core of the OER movement and, notably, there are few studies that look at the efficacy of these pedagogical practices in the same form and scale as much of the extant OER research. The traditional summative assessment, which was assigned to the control group, asked students to demonstrate skills mastery by composing a unified, long-form essay containing a rhetorical analysis of a political speech of their choosing This formal rhetorical analysis essay would qualify as a ‘throwaway’ assignment because it has no value to anyone beyond the demonstration of skills and subsequent receipt of a grade (not to mention that it is not interesting to write or evaluate). Any students contributing to the wiki did so with the understanding that the content would be licensed CC BY-SA

Assessments and Results

Concept Quiz Results

Results

Assessment and Results

Conclusion