It is nice occasionally researching a new area that is somewhat different from your main vein. About 18 months ago, I agreed to take part in a longitudinal qualitative study consisting of both focus group forums and one-on-one interviews regarding the learning management system (LMS) I use in my college courses. There, I met another professor from a different school named Lane Boyte-Eckis, who teaches in the Economics department at Troy University.
We decided to stay in touch once the study ended, and she invited me to partake in a research group that involved a few Troy faculty members. They have been studying various interventions both at the high school and college levels that lead to better student performance in college.
To date, we have authored three papers together. The first two involve the implementation of a policy at a regional university. The policy mandates embedded asynchronous video lectures into online Economics courses. These two studies look at student grades in these online courses before and after the implementation of the policy.
The first paper specifically investigates the effect this policy had on student performance in the school's Microeconomics introductory course. Using time series analysis, the results were rather disappointing: no statistical significance. Nevertheless, we still learned valuable lessons regarding data cleaning and categorization. This was tricky mainly because the regional university has a five-term academic calendar, and it is not intuitive in terms of which term is "first" in the year (it does not follow the traditional Fall-Spring academic year or the January-December calendar year).
The other two papers are in still in review. Despite the lack of significance of the results, our micro paper was nevertheless accepted for publication in the Journal of Business, Industry, and Economics (JOBIE) where you can read and download our paper for free HERE. JOBIE is included in Cabell's Directory of Publishing Opportunities and has a 15% acceptance rate.
I co-authored this piece with Drs. Lane Boyte-Eckis and Anand Krishnamoorthy. It was a great experience--here's to many more!
