EJEL
Volume 7 Issue 2
June 2009
Special Issue ECEL 2008

How Reproducible Research Leads to Non-Rote Learning Within Socially Constructivist Statistics Education

Patrick Wessa
K.U.Leuven Association, Lessius Dept. of Business Studies, Belgium

This paper discusses the implementation of a new e-learning environment that supports non-rote learning of exploratory and inductive statistics within the pedagogical paradigm of social constructivism. The e-learning system is based on a new computational framework that allows us to create an electronic research environment where students are empowered to interact with reproducible computations from peers and the educator. The underlying technology effectively supports social interaction (communication), knowledge construction, collaboration, and scientific experimentation even if the student population is very large. In addition, the system allows us to measure important aspects of the actual learning process which are otherwise unobservable. With this new information it is possible to explore (and investigate) the effectiveness of e-based learning, the impact of software usability, and the importance of knowledge construction through various feedback and communication mechanisms.
Based on a preliminary empirical analysis from two courses (with large student populations) it is shown that there are strong relationships between actual constructivist learning activities and scores on objective examinations, in which the questions assess conceptual understanding. For this purpose it was necessary to objectively measure the constructivist learning activities through reproducible computing technology which allows students to reproduce empirical results, and reuse them in derived research that can be easily communicated (within the context of peer review). Even if there are differences between the cohorts of the student population, the overall conclusion is that the number of submitted, peer review-related feedback messages is strongly associated with exam scores whereas the number of received messages from peers is not (or less) important.

Keywords: statistics education, reproducible research, reproducible computing, social constructivism, non-rote learning

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