a excel homework assignments

a excel homework assignments

The Impact of Excel Homework Assignments on Student Learning

1. Introduction

Millions of students with little or no prior exposure to computer programming in or out of high school are now required to do programming in college. The current paper uses two datasets to investigate the impact of assignments requiring students to program in Excel. The authors find that students’ performance in key follow-on IT courses is influenced by how much they learn in the Excel-assisted courses. In fact, performance is influenced by improvement on Excel assignments even if follow-on grades are based exclusively on programming languages not present in Excel.

Each assignment inspired by this modeling technique was originally designed as a stand-alone homework. Students manipulate data and report results without venturing into the world of formulas and formula errors, reducing the likelihood of a negative impact on student learning about business problems that involve only data manipulation. These data manipulation assignments were eventually combined into a semester-long grade large enough to motivate students to take each individual assignment seriously. The authors supplemented the data manipulation assignments with longer modeling projects not motivated by the “end-of-session plea to help us understand business better” tradition emphasized in business statistics courses. These projects allow students to use their modeling results to either predict the outcome of or prescribe the best management action for a business problem outside of the professor’s experience.

2. The Benefits of Using Excel in Education

Microsoft Excel was created by a Microsoft team in 1984. The initial release was made in 1985 for the Macintosh and, eventually, three years later, Excel was introduced for Windows. Today, Excel is considered one of the most significant software pieces. It is hard to imagine any finance, business, or science tasks without Excel. Education is not an exception. The number of educational institutions using Excel is growing annually. The reasons for this are clear. Colleges and universities are in different ways implementing tasks and projects that utilize Excel. The use of Excel in higher education can help teach skills necessary for the students after their graduation and make them understand complex financial and business problems and thus better improve their decisions. Excel can be applied to various areas of education.

This application software helps educators develop simple or complex tools and models for various problem domains. Instructors and students use Excel to perform statistical analysis and hypothesis testing and to create complex financial formulas. The experiences developed while working on homework and projects help students transfer what they have learned to internships and the workplace. Excel is also an efficient way for educators to score, tutor, and provide feedback to students during office hours. Excel scores the assignments, not the educator. Excel also helps the educators make use of modest computing resources in their offices. Lastly, Excel reduces the need for investing large amounts of time and effort required to write, continue, and maintain computer code. As you can see, the application of Excel in today’s pedagogy is clear. Moreover, even if students are not able to retain a significant portion of the knowledge from their educational experiences, they keep the expertise acquired while interacting with Microsoft Excel. Excel brings various benefits to educators and students, but we will focus on just a few of them.

3. Designing Effective Excel Homework Assignments

We often employ one or more of the following eight strategies in our Excel homework assignments to maximize the learning associated with them. If you need to quickly see an example of how one or more of these strategies can be implemented in a homework assignment, please skip ahead to Chapter 4. If you are interested in a more in-depth look at any particular strategy, simply continue to the next section that interests you.

Lesson or Application-Based Homework Assignments. In the same way that we should strive to write lessons independent of charts or software applications, we should also adequately integrate the use of these tools with the lesson or application. Otherwise, we risk not only diluting the value of this integration, but also extending the time required to cover the lesson or the application. This dilution will often negatively impact students’ motivation, as they will spend excessive time learning the use of the application or the lesson, while not enough time learning the lesson or the application. Therefore, when we do not adequately integrate the use of a computer application with a lesson or an application itself, students ‘dislike’ the application they must use and, in fact, develop a ‘lifelong aversion’ to using the application.

4. Assessment Strategies for Excel Homework

Among the assessment strategies created to motivate resource investment and effort in homework are: basing the grading on professional practice, scoring student work on how well it resembles professional work products. Imposing constraints such as deadlines on completion and assigning both challenging, relevant tasks and a large number of graded, guided examples. Although more research is needed about the relationship between learning and these factors, experienced practitioners believe they are important.

In this paper, the authors describe their approach within both institutional and classroom constraints in enlisting assessment to motivate student effort in mastering Microsoft Excel. Since the hiring organization helps establish the value of mastering Excel, it is easy to grade student work as accounting and information systems professionals would grade it. By designing the reporting tool that yields student grades to resemble professional Excel work products, we increase the grading equity and reliability. Like accounting and business information systems professionals, we have found it is best to practice the production of professional assignments, thus the professors also invest time and effort creating the necessary, constrained, complex Excel artifacts. Since they also require investment of time and effort, we have a large number of graded examples to distribute to students to supplement tutoring. Diverse strategies for assessing Excel related work truly motivate students to create resources that are capable of facilitating student learning.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

Consistent with prior research, the results of our study suggest that applying the material from the textbook in a series of homework assignments enhanced student performance in an accounting course. Our research extends the prior literature by utilizing multiple sections and instructors, controlling for previous academic background and natural differences in instructors. Our findings should encourage faculty to use computer applications to extend their students’ knowledge beyond the limits of traditional classroom use of textbook material. However, the focus of the homework assignments was on applying the techniques presented in the textbook. Future research should examine other possible benefits of encouraging students to apply Excel, including but not limited to critical thinking, memory, and communication skills.

Our study has several limitations. First, a significant portion of the improvement in exam performance was due to the increased amount of time students spent studying for the exams, as measured by the exam preparation questions. Although total hours of time invested might be less relevant if other potential benefits, such as increased communication and critical thinking, would accrue to students. Second, our sample was self-selected. To determine the generalizability of our results, our research must be replicated in other courses and schools.