Work in progress - a study of the effect of instructional media in an undergraduate electrical circuits course

Studies have demonstrated that instructional media play an important role in instructors’ teaching and students’ learning. The purpose of this study is to assess the students’ preferences for different instructional media and the impact of different instructional media on the students’ learning and course-related behavior in an undergraduate electrical circuit’s course. The instructional media under study are: Computer-based PowerPoint presentation, whiteboard only, combination of PowerPoint and whiteboard and combination of printed handouts and whiteboard. In this study, nine sections of Introduction to Electrical Circuits sections were taught by 6 instructors using different instructional media. All the instructors used a common syllabus, labs, homework, and tests. Two midterm exams and one final exam were used to assess the learning effectiveness of different instructional media. At the end of the quarter, a questionnaire was collected from participating students to measure their preference for the instructional media. To understand the course related behavior, each of the instructors were asked to assess their students’ behavior in terms of attendance, amount of classroom interaction, percent of homework completion and web logins.