Instrumenting and supporting college course-selection decision-making processes
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Many U.S. universities encourage undergraduates to consider a variety of academic options before committing to a field of study. Through course-selection decision-making processes, students gravitate toward particular ideas, skills, and careers and away from others. Yet despite the consequences of these processes, scientific studies of the processes have been particularly limited. A team of three professors, a PhD student (the dissertation author), two Master's students, and six undergraduates have developed the first version of Carta in two years to instrument course-selection decision-making processes. Launched in August 2016 at a selective private research university, Carta is a course exploration platform based on university enrollment data and end-of-course evaluation survey data. As of December 2019, 98% of the current undergraduates have used Carta. We introduced a framework for understanding the students' elective choice by modeling it as a longitudinal funnel, with course consideration as an intermediary stage between course availability and course choice. Then we leveraged Carta to observe course consideration empirically. To examine how students' exposure to systematic information about available academic options influences their course consideration, effort regulation, and performance, we conducted two large-scale field experiments. In the first experiment, all the undergraduates on campus were randomized to an encouragement to use Carta. In the second experiment, they were randomized to an exposure to grade distributions and self-reported time commitment distributions of prior students. The results demonstrated that information about prior students' grade distributions lowered current students' overall GPA by 0.16, or approximately half the distance between, for example, a B+ and a B. The elective system makes it easy for students to avoid exploring courses due to issues such as lower grades and fitting in. Aiming to alleviate these concerns, we implemented a writing exercise on Carta that asks students to reflect on their core values during course consideration. Our longitudinal field experiment shows that the activity increased exploratory enrollment by 15% for majors with requirement units below the median, the majors that coincide with humanities and sciences majors. These studies point to a future of data-driven higher education in which student data, research and experimentation, teaching and learning, and university administration are all tightly connected to continually improve the experience for all participants--students, faculty, and administrators alike. Carta is a living computational social system in which one can design, test, learn, and repeat
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Chaturapruek, Sorathan | |
|---|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Johari, Ramesh, 1976- | |
| Thesis advisor | Johari, Ramesh, 1976- | |
| Thesis advisor | Mitchell, John C | |
| Thesis advisor | Bernstein, Michael S, 1984- | |
| Thesis advisor | Stevens, Mitchell L | |
| Degree committee member | Mitchell, John C | |
| Degree committee member | Bernstein, Michael S, 1984- | |
| Degree committee member | Stevens, Mitchell L | |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Computer Science Department. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Sorathan Chaturapruek |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Computer Science Department |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Sorathan Chaturapruek
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