UNCW EDN 523 - A RANDOMIZED INSTRUCTIONAL EXPERIMENT

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Research in Higher Education, Vol. 44, No. 3, June 2003 ( 2003)LEARNING ON CAMPUS AND LEARNINGAT A DISTANCE: A RANDOMIZEDINSTRUCTIONAL EXPERIMENTJoseph Collins* and Ernest T. Pascarella‡,**:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::To address a major methodological problem in the body of evidence on distancelearning in postsecondary education, we conducted a randomized, true-experimentpaired with a quasi-experiment. Community college students randomly assigned toreceive instruction at a distance via a two-way interactive telecourse demonstratedlearning equivalent to that of students assigned to on-campus, face-to-face instruc-tion. However, students choosing to take the course via telecourse at remote siteshad significantly higher course learning than either randomly assigned group. Suchevidence suggests that the body of evidence on distance learning could be seriouslyconfounded by learner self-selection.:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::KEY WORDS: distance learning; instructional effects; community college students.INTRODUCTIONParalleling the recent unprecedented development of information and mediatechnologies has been the dramatic growth of distance or remote site instruc-tional offerings in postsecondary education (El-Khawas, 1995; Moore andThompson, 1997). For example, a 1997 report by the National Center for Educa-tion Statistics found that approximately 60% of American public 2- and 4-yearinstitutions offered distance education courses, usually in the form of either one-way prerecorded courses or two-way interactive video courses (Lewis, Ferris,and Alexander, 1997). Distance education has been used to deliver remote siteor off-campus courses in a variety of fields, including business, library science,teacher education, general studies, medicine and nursing, social sciences, socialwork, and scientific/technical fields (Burgess, 1994).*Kirkwood Community College, Cedar Rapids, IA.‡The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA.**Address correspondence to: Ernest Pascarella, Educational Policy and Leadership Studies, 491Lindquist Center North, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242. E-mail: [email protected]/03/0600-0315/0  2003 Human Sciences Press, Inc.316 COLLINS AND PASCARELLALiterally hundreds of studies have addressed the issue of whether instructiondelivered to remote sites via various media technologies is as effective as tradi-tional face-to-face instruction offered on campus. The clear weight of evidencefrom this research indicates that students who study via distance education ap-proaches appear to learn as much course content as do their counterparts inconventional, on-campus classroom settings. This conclusion is the consensusof an impressive number of research reviews or meta-analyses of the researchevidence (Barker, Frisbie, and Patrick, 1989; Jones, Simonson, Kemis, and Sor-ensen, 1992; Machtmes and Asher, 2000; Moore and Thompson, 1990, 1997;Olcott, 1992; Pittman, 1991; Russell, 1995, 1999; Schlosser and Anderson,1994; Wetzel, Radtke, and Stern, 1994; Zigerell, 1991). Moreover, the weightof evidence that does exist also suggests that per-student costs of courses offeredin a distance education format are not appreciably different than those offeredin a conventional on-campus format (Wetzel et al., 1994).Despite clear consensus in the evidence, there are major methodological prob-lems in the body of research. A recent report outlines a number of these prob-lems (Institute for Higher Education Policy, 1999; Merisotis and Phipps, 1999).Perhaps the most serious is that geographical or related constraints make it ex-tremely difficult to conduct true-experiments that, because of random assign-ment of individual learners to instructional formats, maximize the ability tomake causal inferences. Rather, nearly every comparative study is, understand-ably, characterized by students self-selecting themselves into on-campus andremote site instructional groups. Consequently, the body of evidence on distance(vs. face-to-face, on-campus) instruction and student learning is flawed by amajor threat to causal inference (or internal validity)—the interaction of self-selection and course achievement (Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991). The reasonswhy students take courses on campus or at distant sites in the first place mayrepresent a constellation of uncontrolled influences that bias the body of evi-dence in unknown ways.This problem is particularly apparent with respect to the use of audiovisualtelecourses in distance education. In an informative meta-analysis, Machtmesand Asher (2000) uncovered more than 700 studies that dealt with the use oftelecourses in distance education. Out of those 700+ studies, only two wererandomized, true-experiments that compared the learning of students receivinginstruction via telecourses and those receiving on-campus, face-to-face instruc-tion. The results of these two experiments are inconsistent. One experiment,conducted 40 years ago, indicated that face-to-face instruction tended to be moreeffective than instruction via a telecourse (Carpenter and Greenhill, 1963). Theother experiment, in which the intervention was a single lecture rather than anentire course, suggested the reverse (Ritchie and Newby, 1989). Neither studyreported the psychometric characteristics of the instruments used to assessachievement. Furthermore, the studies were conducted before the decade of the317LEARNING ON CAMPUS AND AT A DISTANCE1990s, during which significant advances were made in audiovisual telecoursetechnology.Given this major problem in the existing evidence, the present study had twomajor purposes. First, it addressed concerns about the internal validity of theexisting evidence by means of a randomized, true-experiment that compared thelearning of community college students receiving course instruction in a tradi-tional face-to-face format on campus with that of students receiving course in-struction at a distance via a two-way interactive (audio and visual) telecourse.The second major purpose of the study was to estimate the extent to whichlearner self-selection (an almost universal characteristic in the existing body ofevidence) might bias the results of studies of student learning in face-to-faceand distance learning modes. This was accomplished by also comparing thecourse learning of students in the randomly assigned, face-to-face


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