Monday, June 10, 2002

Stronger Students Benefit More From Online Course, Texas Study Finds By DAN CARNEVALE A study by two psychologists has found that students who have good general-comprehension skills benefited more from taking a course online than did students with less ability. "The rich get richer," one of the professors said. In the study, two professors at Texas Tech University had students take a comprehension-assessment examination before taking the course. The exam consisted of three sections. Students would read a passage, listen to a passage, and see a series of pictures not accompanied by any words. After each of the three sections, students would answer questions testing how well they comprehended what they had read, heard, or seen. The students then enrolled in a freshman-level introductory-psychology course at Texas Tech. The study followed several classes through the course during a three-year period from 1999 to 2001, with 94 students taking a traditional classroom section and 95 taking the online version. In the online version, students met in a classroom for an hour once a week, but completed all their assignments online. The study was conducted by William S. Maki, a psychology professor, and Ruth H. Maki, chairwoman of the psychology department. A report on the results of the study appears in the June issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. (The report, titled "Multimedia Comprehension Skill Predicts Differential Outcomes of Web-Based and Lecture Courses," is available on the journal's Web site. It can be viewed using Adobe Acrobat Reader, available free.) The students who scored better on the comprehension test did better in the course over all, to no one's surprise. Students in the classroom version who did not score well on the comprehension test learned essentially the same amount as did their counterparts in the online section, the professors found. But online students who did well on the comprehension test learned more than students in the traditional classroom who did well on the comprehension test -- the online students learned 10 percent more, according to assessment tests. "The students with the high comprehension skills are the ones that benefit from the Web-based courses," Mr. Maki said. What causes the discrepancy is still a mystery. It could be the result of factors other than that the course is online, he said. For one thing, the online course is structured differently than the lecture-based course. Online students have to keep up with new material daily and have multiple deadlines during a week. The traditional course, meanwhile, had three exams during the semester. Interestingly, the students in the online version expressed less satisfaction with the psychology course than did the students in the classroom section -- regardless of how well they performed in the course. When the professors began the study, they were hoping to find a way to help students with poorer comprehension skills perform better in a course. Byron W. Brown, a professor of economics at Michigan State University, has conducted his own study comparing online and face-to-face sections in an engineering course. He found that, over all, the online students performed more poorly than the students in the traditional classroom. After reviewing the Makis' study, Mr. Brown said in an e-mail message that conducting research like that is difficult because so many variables contribute to the outcome, including the quality of the instructor's teaching and how well the online course is put together. But focusing on comprehension skills, as the Makis did, is a good way to try to determine what types of students will succeed in online courses, Mr. Brown said. "We'll continue to see a variety of outcomes on the issue of Web versus face-to-face instruction," he said. "In the end, I hope we'll learn how to make both kinds of learning better." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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