Using unstructured questions to enhance critical thinking in an asynchronous, online, introductory financial accounting course
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Stakeholders are concerned that accounting graduates cannot consistently demonstrate critical thinking (CT) skills. Assessments such as unstructured questions have been used successfully in both face-to-face and online senior courses in an effort to enhance CT skill development, but little is known about the impact of such interventions in online junior courses. This study invited students enrolled in an asynchronous, continuous-enrollment, online offering of an introductory accounting course to participate in a control and experimental group. An intervention aimed at enhancing a student’s CT skill development was introduced to students in the experimental group. The intervention engaged students in a web-based, active learning method that required them to respond to unstructured questions to which peers provided and assessed reciprocal feedback. Although peer assessments were not included as part of a student’s course grade, students received a maximum of 5% based on their rate of participation with the intervention. Two sources of data were collected: 1) survey responses from the experimental group regarding students’ experience with the intervention, and 2) differences in the midterm and final exam results between the control and experimental groups. An analysis of the survey data collected from the experimental participants indicated that their perception regarding the impact of the intervention on their learning was generally favourable despite concerns raised about the reciprocal feedback process. However, the validity of the respondents’ feedback was put into question because of the significant non-response rate. Based on an analysis of the midterm and final exam grades, the null hypothesis that no statistically significant difference existed between the midterm and final examination results of the control and experimental groups was accepted. This conclusion does not mean, however, that CT cannot be measured, nor does it mean that the intervention did not enhance CT skill development. It is more likely that the results from this study mean that grades were not a sufficient indicator of CT. This interpretation raises the question of what, then, would be an effective measure of CT? The results demonstrate that continued research is required to determine what strategy(s) might be effective in measuring CT.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".