Monday, February 25, 2002

Online Students Don't Fare as Well as Classroom Counterparts, Study Finds By DAN CARNEVALE Professors at Michigan State University have found that students who took an economics course online didn't do as well as students who took the same course in a traditional classroom. The researchers also found that women weren't hurt by the online environment as much as men were. Traditionally, women don't do as well in economics courses as men do. The results of the study, to be published this spring in the American Economic Review, were surprising, says Byron W. Brown, a professor of economics at Michigan State. Mr. Brown, who is also a coordinator of instructional-technology support at the university, conducted the study as part of his research on the economics of education. He worked with Carl Liedholm, the economics professor who taught the course. Other researchers have found no significant difference between the performance of students in distance-education courses and students who attend face-to-face courses. The professors reviewed the students' answers to questions on tests given during the course, "Principles of Microeconomics." The study covered the work of 89 students enrolled in two online course sections and 363 students enrolled in two face-to-face sections during the fall 2000 and spring 2001 semesters. Students who took the traditional sections on average answered 65.49 percent of the questions correctly, while the students who took the course online got 61.19 percent correct, on average. A third group of 258 students who took a hybrid course, mixing technology and face-to-face aspects, answered an average of 64.51 percent of the questions correctly. The figures represent about a 10-percent poorer understanding of the material by the online students, Mr. Brown says. "That is a significant difference," he says. "That is not a statistical artifact." The students who took the online sections of the course tended to have more college experience and slightly higher ACT scores. The online sections also had fewer than half as many students as the traditional sections. But even with those benefits going for them, the online students fared worse, Mr. Brown says. The results of the study don't prove that online education isn't any good, Mr. Brown says. For one thing, many of these students would not have been able to take the economics course had it not been available online. "In the great scheme of things, I'd first like to say that the Luddites shouldn't take great comfort in this," he says. Thomas Russell, director emeritus of instructional telecommunications at North Carolina State University, says he wasn't surprised to learn that a study showed online students performing more poorly than their traditional counterparts. But, he adds, the study isn't the final word on the issue. Although he has not seen the Michigan State study, he has tracked several studies that compare online courses to traditional ones, and most show that students perform about equally in both, he says. On his Web site, Mr. Russell lists information from many articles and studies comparing online and traditional courses. The Michigan State study, he suspects, will help in furthering the discussion about the quality of online courses. "With human subjects, there are so many variables," Mr. Russell says. "But a preponderance of the evidence still says no significant difference." A number of factors might have influenced the outcome of the study, Mr. Brown says. The online students typically had jobs and other responsibilities that pulled them away from their studies. Even though they could view videos of all the in-class lectures online, half of the distance students did not take full advantage of the materials, reporting that they spent zero to three hours a week studying for class. On the other hand, attendance records show that about 80 percent of the students in the traditional sections showed up for all three of the lecture hours per week. "If all they do is show up for class, they're doing more than the online students," Mr. Brown says. "I'm a believer that if you spend more time on something, it's going to rub off on you." Mr. Liedholm's charisma and effective interaction with the on-site students may be another factor, Mr. Brown says. Even though online students could watch videos of the lectures, they weren't able to get that same level of face-to-face interaction. The study also revealed that, in the online sections, female students did as well as male students. The average score for women in the traditional sections was about six points lower than the average score for men. But in the online sections, men and women performed at roughly the same level. Mr. Brown says women traditionally do worse than their male counterparts in economics courses. No one knows exactly why, he says, but some experts believe that men are more aggressive in class discussions, while women are more introspective and don't speak out as much. Putting the course online levels the playing field, Mr. Brown says -- possibly because women feel more comfortable discussing their ideas in online chats than they do blurting out answers in classrooms. He also says that the computerized exercises created for the online sections seem to help female students learn economics concepts better. But Mr. Brown says more research should be done to find ways to help women in economics courses. "We're not claiming that this erases the gender difference in economics classes," he says. The study is available online. It can be viewed with Adobe Acrobat Reader, available free. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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