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Jesus Nava

Professor French

ENGL 1301

15 April 2017

IMRaD Lab Report

The importance of Blackboard to the college students at Tarrant County College is

immense if used correctly. Things such as course grades, announcements and daily assignments

are give through Blackboard a medium faculty uses to connect with students. As I read an article

discussing how an attempt to have features Blackboard now has teachers had to use what now

seem more complex methods to receive the same results. Stephanie J. Coopman was a professor

from California who in 1999 had to improvise how to enhance her students learning experience

and relations between the teacher and the students. (Coopman) She had to create an entire

website just for her class then would email the students the URL. (Coopman) What alerted

me about a teacher and her comments on Blackboard which were Blackboard administrators

and management likely conflict with instructors goals was how teachers based off of her

research did not think Blackboard was improving as it could be. (Cooper) Acknowledging its

importance, I designed a questionnaire to establish the relationship between students use of the

software and factors that determine their use and the reflection of their grades. I narrowed down

my questionnaire to Tarrant County College (TCC) students only.

METHODS

When it came to how I would approach making the questionnaire I took into account the

easiest methods to analyze the data and not get confusing results. I asked a total of 10 students to

make analyzing the data simple and using even numbers. My sample was from Tarrant County
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College students only and was given out in class. Given that Blackboard is one of the most

common software used by students I felt asking any student would not jeopardize the results. I

used three different types of questions, 4 multiple choice, 4 Likert scale, and 2 yes or no

questions. The reason for multiple choice was for more specific information about students

academic details. Examples such as the amount of semesters completed, and GPA of the student

which have more specific answers. I then had four likert scale questions that had to do with them

actually using the software and what they thought about it. For example, I asked how easy was it

to navigate it, and how often their professors utilized it as well. Lastly I asked two yes or no

questions. The yes or no questions entailed questions about whether or not they had used certain

features of the software. A question was whether they had utilized the software to communicate

not with professors but with other students. When it came to analyzing the data I approached my

results using pie charts and bar graphs. I categorized all of my likert scale results into bar graphs,

I found the average of each question by multiplying the number chosen by the amount of people

who chose that answer, added all the amounts and then divided by my sample size. On the X-axis

I numbered 1-5 which was my range on all likert scales, and on the Y-axis I labeled the questions

that used the likert scale. When it came to the multiple choice questions and yes or no questions,

I settled with pie charts as it would be visually easy to see the results.
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Question 9

30% YES
NO

70%

Figure 1 (YES or No) Figure 2 (YES or NO)

Question 7

10%
YES
NO

90%

RESULTS
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My total of two yes or no questions were put into pie charts. In question 7 90% of the

students answered YES to receiving an email whenever their professor would post anything on

blackboard, with only 10% answering NO. Question 9 had 70% of students answering NO to

communicating with other students through Blackboard while 30% of students answered YES

to communicating with others.

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Question 1

D; 20%; 20% A
B
A; 40%; 40%
C
D
C; 40%; 40%

Question 3

B; 10% A
B
D; 50% C
C; 40% D
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Question 5

D; 55% A
B
C
A; 18% D

C; 30%; B;
14%30%; 14%
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Question 10

A
B
C; 40%
C
B; 60% D

When it came to multiple choice questions I chose to use all 3D pie charts. When it came

to the multiple choice like I mentioned before they were asked in efforts to better know the

student taking the survey and how it could have an effect on their use of Black Board. Question 1

I had students answer the amount of semesters they had completed and almost had a 50/50 split

with 40% having completed 1 semester and 40% having completed 3 semesters. The remaining

20% had completed 4 or more. When it came to question 3 I asked students How often they

checked blackboard with the majority answering often and very often. When it came to

question 5 I asked students how many days a week they attended school, with 40% attending 1-2

days, 30% attending 3-4 days and 30% attending

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Likert Scale Questions

3.9

2.4

4.2

4.6

Lastly when it came to the likert scale questions I decided to display the information

using a bar graph. I found the average of each question and graphed it above. The scale used was

1-5 and asked a total of 4 questions. On question 8 students were asked how often their

professors posted study material on Blackboard and I received an average of 3.9 out of 5.

Question 6 asked students how easy using Blackboard was, the average was a 2.4 out of 5.

Question 4 asked students how often they would submit assignments online through Blackboard,
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the average was 4.2 meaning the majority of them would often. Lastly question 2 asked how easy

it was for students to access a computer and received an average of 4.6 with the majority having

access.

DISCUSSION

Based off all of my results I have conjured up a few correlations and differences among

the information. First off what was most apparent was the distinction between the number of

semesters the students in my sample size had taken. With having slightly over half with an entire

school year under their belt and the rest with one semester completed it did not translate with the

rest of the students answers. Which showed that having attended college longer did not mean

higher GPAs. A counter to my sample size I believe if it were larger maybe there could some

correlation found between GPAs and semesters taken. I then proceeded to notice how out of all

of my likert scales number 6 had the lowest average. More than half believed that Blackboard

was an easy software to use. Then a correlation was apparent in the students who had said

Blackboard was easy to use, they all had answered NO to whether or not they had

communicated with other students through Blackboard. All of this information made me pose the

question whether students who found it easy were using Blackboard for basic functions and

not utilizing vitals tools like discussion boards amongst students. If a larger sample size was

questioned with a bit more tool related questions it could be added to my data for a deeper

analysis on the full use of Blackboard at different TCC campuses. I believed my results were

straight forward and easy to read, but I believe I should have increased the number of people

questioned along with a larger variety. I could have split up the survey by characteristics such as

boy/girl or fulltime/part time students to have a comparison before the questioning even begins

and made the data vary a bit more. Based off of my results I was able to that there needed to be a
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larger sample size to have varied results, possibly asking different classes based off of certain

criteria. Ultimately I got expected results from everyone but not the variety I was hoping for, I

thought there would have been more of a contrast that was large enough to compare.
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Works Cited

Coopman, Stephanie J. "A Critical Examination of Blackboard's E-learning Environment."First

Monday. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2017.