Abstract This study examines instructor strategies for designing and participating in online discussions and how these strategies influence their students’ participation and course performance in university introductory online mathematics courses. The study leveraged data and text mining techniques to examine five years of online discussion data automatically collected by a Learning Management System from 72 introductory online mathematics courses involving over 2,800 instructors and students who collectively contributed over 22,000 posts. A classification and regression tree (CART) analysis of instructor strategies revealed four instructor participation variables (open-ended discussion, grading, discussion setting, elaborated feedback) that impacted student course performance and nine that did not. Further, students in courses where instructors used open-ended discussion prompts and graded posts had higher average final course grades. An examination of how instructor discussion strategies influenced student participation found that subgroups of students with lower average final course grades tended to engage in less online speaking and listening, while also contributing more posts categorized as social interactions and fewer related to course content. Students in subgroups with higher average final course grades tended to engage in more online listening and contributed more posts coded as higher in knowledge construction.

中文翻译：

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教师使用在线讨论策略对大学在线数学入门课程学生参与和表现的影响

摘要 本研究考察了教师设计和参与在线讨论的策略，以及这些策略如何影响学生在大学入门在线数学课程中的参与和课程表现。该研究利用数据和文本挖掘技术来检查学习管理系统从 72 门介绍性在线数学课程中自动收集的五年在线讨论数据，这些课程涉及 2,800 多名教师和学生，他们共同贡献了 22,000 多个帖子。教师策略的分类和回归树 (CART) 分析揭示了四个影响学生课程表现的教师参与变量（开放式讨论、评分、讨论设置、详细反馈），而九个则没有。更多，在教师使用开放式讨论提示和评分帖子的课程中，学生的平均最终课程成绩更高。一项关于教师讨论策略如何影响学生参与的检查发现，平均最终课程成绩较低的学生子群体倾向于较少参与在线口语和听力，同时也贡献更多归类为社交互动的帖子，而与课程内容相关的帖子较少。最终课程平均成绩较高的子群体中的学生倾向于进行更多的在线聆听，并贡献了更多的知识构建编码为更高的帖子。一项关于教师讨论策略如何影响学生参与的检查发现，平均最终课程成绩较低的学生子群体倾向于较少参与在线口语和听力，同时也贡献更多归类为社交互动的帖子，而与课程内容相关的帖子较少。最终课程平均成绩较高的子群体中的学生倾向于进行更多的在线聆听，并贡献了更多的知识构建编码为更高的帖子。一项关于教师讨论策略如何影响学生参与的检查发现，平均最终课程成绩较低的学生子群体倾向于较少参与在线口语和听力，同时也贡献更多归类为社交互动的帖子，而与课程内容相关的帖子较少。最终课程平均成绩较高的子群体中的学生倾向于进行更多的在线聆听，并贡献了更多的知识构建编码为更高的帖子。