The Effects of Instructional and Administrative Text Messages on Academic Achievement and Student Perception of Learning in a High School Food, Nutrition, and Wellness Classroom

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of instructional and administrative text messages on student academic achievement and perception of learning. The study takes place at a public high school located in North Georgia. Participants include 9th through 12th grade students enrolled in the food, nutrition, and wellness courses. 128 students will be involved in this study with 61 being male and 67 being female. Of these 128 students, 36 are freshmen, 59 are sophomores, 31 are juniors, and 2 are seniors. There will be one certified Food, Nutrition, and Wellness teacher involved in this study. This teacher is the researcher and has five years of teaching experience. In this quasi-experimental study, there will be an experimental group and a comparison group. The experimental group will be comprised of students in two classes and the comparison group will be comprised of students in two different classes. Students in the experimental group will receive instructional and administrative text messages three times a week for a total of nine weeks. Instructional text messages include text, videos and imagery of relevant in-class information that reviews content covered in the unit. Administrative text messages serve to help students remember due dates for classroom assignments and materials they needed to bring to class on lab days. At the end of the experiment, data will be collected from teacher-made pre and post assessments for academic achievement as well as classroom community subscale for student perception of learning. Both the pretest and posttest contain 40 items prepared by the teacher and were given to participants to assess knowledge about the unit involved in the study. The unit covers information about quick breads, yeast breads, meat, and meat products. A classroom community scale developed by Rovai (2002) was given to participants in both groups as a pre and post assessment to measure for student perception of learning in the course. The survey uses a 5-point Likert-type scale consisting of 10 questions. Results of the data will be analyzed using SPSS software