College Puzzle (no peeking)
Posted: February 28th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 5 Comments »
Which college students learned more?
A research team randomly assigns college students to take a math course in two ways:
a. Mostly on the computer, combined with one hour per week in-person with the instructor lecturing
or
b. Traditional 3 hour/week course with the instructor in-person
Which college students had higher pass rates or final-exam scores? The mostly online or the traditional?
Take a guess in the comments section. I’d guess too but I accidentally read the results already (there was no “spoiler alert” in the text).
I’ll describe the full study later, though if you’re impatient, a little Googling will tell you what happened.
How many students in the in-person hour with the instructor? Was that the same for the traditional class?
That is, a small group one hour a week, where you know you’ll be responsible for that week’s learning and that the teacher will be able to see whether or not you are ready is likely more effective than a traditional 3 hour class of 50+ in which a student knows they won’t be called on.
I think it depends a LOT on the online methodology (guided independent practice à la Khan, video lecture, etc.) and the quality of the in-person lecturer. Not knowing anything else, though, I’d guess median pass-rates and scores were nearly the same, but that the variance of both measures was bigger for the students who took the class online. If you go to class, you soak up at least something, but you also can’t hit ‘pause.’ Some of the online students, meanwhile, probably never brought themselves to put in the screen time, while others took advantage of the opportunity to differentiate the pace of learning according to their own needs in a way that isn’t permitted by in-person lectures (e.g., rewinding and fast-forwarding recorded video lectures or using highly responsive problem sets such as Khan’s).
Okay, here’s the study.
http://educationnext.org/online-learning-in-higher-education/
“We find no clear differences in learning outcomes between students in the traditional- and hybrid-format sections.”
Also
“We also asked students how many hours per week they spent outside of class working on the statistics class. Hybrid-format students report spending 0.3 hours more each week, on average, than traditional-format students…
..This difference implies that in a course where a traditional section meets for three hours each week and a hybrid section meets for one hour, the average hybrid-format student would spend 1.7 fewer hours each week in total time devoted to the course, a difference of about 25 percent.”
Whoa.
And:
“Extrapolating the results of our study to K–12 education is hardly straightforward. College students are expected to have a degree of self-motivation and self-discipline that younger students may not yet have achieved.”
What do you think?
I think that it sounds like much of the traditional class time, in this case, is not particularly valuable.