307
Copyright © 2014, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Chapter 21
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-4912-5.ch021
Online Homework and
Correlated Success in University
Mathematics Courses:
A Longitudinal Study
ABSTRACT
The primary goals of this project at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) were to use a
free, open-source online tool developed at the University of Kentucky (UK) called WHS (Web Homework
System) for Web-based homework and quizzes in first year mathematics courses and to demonstrate that
the use of this system by students would improve and correlate well with their success in these courses.
Quantitative data were collected and analyzed across four years involving 832 students using this system
and 753 not using the system in seven courses. The findings indicate that faculty and students found the
Web-based homework assignments helpful for a variety of reasons, though some of each found it occa-
sionally frustrating. Students with high (low) scores on the Web homework had a very high probability
of having high (low) grades in the courses, but there were no statistically significant improvements in
final course grades over traditional methods.
INTRODUCTION
At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga,
we had been very frustrated using a variety of
traditional homework formats in our university
mathematics classes, we wanted to take advantage
of the benefits of the online systems described
above, and we believed that with the right
choice of systems we could overcome many of
the disadvantages described later in this article.
Therefore, we chose to use the Web-based Home-
work System (WHS) online homework system,
maintained at the University of Kentucky (UK), to
Stephen W. Kuhn
University of Tennessee–Chattanooga, USA
Sandy W. Watson
University of Tennessee–Chattanooga, USA
Terry J. Walters
University of Tennessee–Chattanooga, USA