The Relationship Between Reasons for Participation and Achievement

Asynchronous Online Discussions (AODs) are often used to encourage online learner participation as they are believed to approximate the verbal interactions of face-to-face (F2F) learning environments while facilitating learners' metacognitive and critical thinking skills (Deng and Tavares, 2013). Despite mixed and somewhat context dependent research on the relationship between AOD participation and achievement, there appears to be a tendency among teachers and instructional designers to encourage greater participation as it is believed that greater participation promotes greater achievement. Additionally, the act of online participation itself is often measured using visible artifacts like discussion and assignment posts submitted by students and evaluated by instructors and/or peers. This can lead educators to infer that the learners who participate more will earn higher grades than those who participate less.To explore this tendency, this quantitative descriptive study examined students enrolled in an introductory college English course (n = 76) using Learning Management System (LMS) activity reports and survey results. This was done to better understand the relationship between (what may appear to be limited) participation and course achievement. Similarly, the study sought to better understand the relationship between the learners' reasons for participation and their actual achievement. The primary results contribute to a wide range of studies that examine the relationship between participation and achievement. The results share a finding with two other studies in particular; Graff, (2005) and Wikle and West (2019), namely that this study showed no statistically significant correlation between participation and achievement for students who finished the course. Meaning that students who completed the course saw no statistically significant change in achievement for over or under participating. An unexpected finding of this study was that reasons for not participating contributed more to student behavior than reasons for posting.This study also showed that learners' primary self-identified reasons for participating favored performance, information seeking, UX and interest; however, empirical performance data suggests that the relationship between learners' reasons for participation and their actual level of achievement is strongest when those reasons revolve around topic complexity, UX, time management and social risk. The gap between learners' metacognitive perception of participation reasons and their data-driven demonstrable reasons is explored in this paper.