The purpose of this assessment was to increase student retention in the online version of PSY230WL by providing them with walkthrough videos that guide them through the practice.
Psychology statistics is a challenging class for students who take it, predominately students emphasizing psychology, pre-nursing majors, and students pursuing various behavioral health degrees. Estrella has done a great job with student success when students take the class in person and can be directly mentored by their instructor. The "WL" in PSY30WL means with lab, and this not only teaches students to use Statistical Software, but creates a lab environment where students get to try their skills hands up with the instructor available to tutor them as they work through the material.
The online statistics class lacks the availability of the faculty in the same way. Despite online office hours, the availability of a tool that can send the exact problem a student is working on to the instructor, and an elaborate set of frequently asked questions with videos, students tend not to use the instructor as a resource. It was hypothesized that this may be one of the reasons that student success rates in the online class are substantially below the in-person classes.
Online statistics has been one of the weak links for students success at EMCC.
The online PSY230WL class is designed as a mastery learning paradigm. There are four components to each week. There are video lectures that give an overview and are presented as Canvas Studio quizzes. These are only 10% of the grade. Then, there are ungraded practice problems, readiness quizzes, and the graded test, the latter of which students can take up to five times.
Here's how a week works. Each chapter is usually broken into 4-6 sections. For each section, students do an ungraded practice. Then, they take thereadiness quiz. Their scores on the readiness quizzes is not part of their grade, but if they get a 70% or less, they have to go back and redo the practice. (Students may take the readiness quiz without the practice, but usually they don't perform well and have to do the practice anyway.) Once they get a 70% on all the week's readiness quizzes, they can take the test, which is 90% of the grade. They are allowed to take the test up to five times.
This system builds in students' ability to self-assess their readiness, and requires them to do the practice without grade risk until they obtain 70% proficiency. Then they can take the test. Students may retake the practice and tests multiple times to earn the A. Students who start early in the week tend to earn an A.
The problem is that many students start late, and don't know how to seek help in a timely manner to get them through the practice. Students tend not to succeed because they don't earn a grade but because they don't have enough time to complete the practice. Data shows they tend to start assignments the day of the due date, despite the fact that they have a full week to complete the assignment, and they get a little extra credit for completing early. To discourage this late starting behavior, students who complete two days before the due date get extra credit. Students who take advantage of this extra credit opportunity tend not to need it, as they give themselves plenty of time and they usually earn an A without the extra credit. Nevertheless, a large number of students don't start until near the deadline, and don't complete the assignments by the due date. This results in a 0. Students do have various built-in extensions, but it is clear that student who tend to start late continue to do so, and often delay their work until the deadline of the extension.
I addressed this problem by creating a series of YouTube videos that are embedded in the Canvas class that walk the students through the practice.
There is are typically 3-6 Walkthrough videos per week, and they tend to map the sections in each week. The video lengths vary from 15 minutes to 3 minutes, with the average being closer to about 10 minutes. There is about 12 hours worth of video.
I set up the first week of class requiring them to watch the walkthrough videos using Canvas studio. For the remainder of the class, the videos are optional. The idea is to walk the students through the practice problems just as they would do themselves. The major difference is that the data they work with will be different than the instructors, but they learn the steps and the patterns of the process, as well as the modelling of the process by the instructor.
The Walkthrough videos were implemented in Fall 2024 and are continuing. According to the Student Performance: Course Retention and Successful Completion by Class Data, increase in retention is dramatic, for Fall 2024 and Spring 2025, success rates increased 10%
- Average success rate for the Fall 2021, 2023, and 2024 was 60%; for Fall 2024 when the videos were implemented, it rose to 70%.
- Average success rate for the Spring 2022 2023, and 2024 was 60%; for Fall 2025, it rose to 71%.
The summer population is somewhat different with students achieving higher success rates in a more time-abbreviated course, but the results were still notable:
- Average success rate for the Summer 2022 2023, and 2024 was 69%; for Summern2025 when the videos were implemented it rose to 93%.
This study showed how the creation of walkthrough videos, that move students through the complicated steps of doing calculations, leads to students empowering themselves and increasing their success in a PSY230WL online class that uses mastery learning, where students can engage the material as much as they want to earn a high grade. The videos have helped students persist with the material and be successful in the class. This provides evidence that supporting online students with the kind of teacher-embodied experiences that are the hallmark of in-person classes can be extended to the online environment.