Blended and Online Student Performance and Persistence: A Comparative Study

With the growing popularity of blended and online course delivery formats, more post-secondary institutions are supplementing traditional pedagogical face-to-face instruction with courses in these modalities. The surge in enrolment in online and blended courses warrants a research on the applicability and practicality of these modalities. Because of the novelty and appeal of eLearning modalities, institutions are still discovering ways to evaluate technology-oriented courses and the types of assessments to include. Moreover, because of the nature of the course and the fear of learning statistics, learners often experience difficulty comprehending key concepts and perform poorly in most assessments. The purpose of this quasi-experimental non-equivalent group design study was to complement the previous qualitative and quantitative findings and add to the literature by comparing students' performance and persistence in statistics in blended and online instructional delivery formats. In this study, the participants were enrolled in an introductory statistics course in blended and online course formats at a large accredited private University with centers and campuses distributed throughout the U.S. To test the hypotheses and compare the assessment averages, descriptive analyses and inferential tests were performed including a one-way Multivariate analysis of Variance (MANOVA), five univariate Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) tests, and an independent samples t-test was performed to compare the persistence rates. The study found that there were significant differences in student performances in quizzes, homework, final exam, threaded discussions for the two modalities. Overall, the study showed that participants in the blended modality had higher averages in quizzes, homework, and final exam while students in the online instructional course format had a better average in discussions threads. Perhaps this says that there are some assessments that maybe better suited for the blended modality and may need extra intervention when delivered in an online instructional format. The only assessments in which students in both modalities performed on average equally were the laboratory assignments. The results of this study also suggest that there is a significant difference in student persistence for the two modalities. On average, student persistence was slightly higher in the blended course format than that in the online modality. An important practical application of this study lies in the contribution it makes to underscore the assessments that may prove challenging for students during the undertaking of the statistics course. Furthermore, potential future research suggestions include qualitative studies that highlight the issues that stifle student performance, relevancy of software-oriented assessments, student and instructor perspectives on the integration of technology, and barriers to successful completion of a math-oriented course.