An Evaluation of Asynchronous Online Discussion Board Formats in Interteaching

Abstract

The current study evaluated the effects of two different styles of discussion board assignments on weekly and cumulative final exam scores in an online asynchronous undergraduate psychology of learning class. In particular, this study used an alternating treatments design to compare three different discussion conditions: (1) interteaching-style discussion, in which students discussed all prep guide questions; (2) essay-style discussion, in which students posted a short essay and discussed essays written by other students; and (3) no discussion. No significant differences were found on weekly or cumulative final exam scores between these three discussion conditions. However, students reported that they preferred and learned more from interteaching-style discussions. It is unclear if the lack of effect on exam scores resulted from the alternating treatments design, which only exposed students to each discussion condition twice during the term. Future researchers could utilize alternate research designs to explore the effects of exposing students to a greater number of asynchronous interteaching discussions throughout the semester. An alternative explanation is that it may be that when prep guides are assigned and graded with detailed feedback, this mitigates the effect of the discussion component. Follow-up studies could investigate the impact of alternative methods for structuring the asynchronous interteaching discussion, and also the effects of adding quality points contingent on the discussion.