Monday 22 November 2021

Low-performing students, online teaching, and self-selection

A regular feature of this blog is highlighting some of the research on online teaching, and blended or flipped classroom teaching, and their effects on student learning (see the lengthy list of links at the end of this post for more). One common theme is that there are differences in the effects of online teaching between more-engaged or high-performing students and less-engaged or low-performing students. This 2013 article that I noticed recently, by Fletcher Lu and Manon Lemonde (both University of Ontario Institute of Technology) and published in the journal Advances in Health Sciences Education (may be open access, but just in case there is an ungated version here), also illustrates this effect.

Lu and Lemonde compare 20 students who chose to take an online statistics course and 72 students that chose to take the same course face-to-face. In addition to looking at performance for all students, they split the sample into high-performing students (those with assignment averages above the median) and low-performing students (those with assignment averages below the median).

Overall, Lu and Lemonde find no statistically significant difference in performance between students in the online and face-to-face teaching modes. However (emphasis is theirs):

For those students categorized as higher performing, their test results replicated the results of the many past studies showing no significant difference in their test performance between online versus face-to-face teaching delivery. But the students categorized as lower performing demonstrated test results that were significantly poorer for those enrolled in the online delivery version compared against their lower performing counter-parts in the face-to-face delivery version.

Now, we shouldn't overstate the significance of this particular study. The number of students was small, so it was probably underpowered to identify positive effects on the high-performing students (as have been observed in other studies). However, the bigger problem is self-selection of students into the mode of teaching. My intuition is that lower-performing (or less motivated) students disproportionately select themselves into online teaching modes. They may do this because they think that the online course will be easier than the face-to-face course (sometimes it will be, but not always), or because they mislead themselves into thinking that the added flexibility of online learning will be better for them (which it probably won't be, based on past research).

Self-selection is not just a problem for identifying the 'true' impacts of online teaching. It has real practical implications for teachers, academic departments, and universities. If we offer 'flexible' modes of teaching, where students can select into online or face-to-face teaching, we run the real risk of segregating the least capable students, and those that are least motivated, into a study mode that does real harm to their learning. It is unfortunate that Lu and Lemonde don't really test for selection effects in their sample (they say that they test for differences by comparing assignment averages, and don't find statistically significant differences, but their small sample size might account for that, and it would be much better to test for a difference in some measure of motivation, or some measure of prior achievement).

At this point, I think we really do need more research into which students actually select online teaching options rather than face-to-face. I hypothesise that, as I noted above, there is a core of less-motivated students who select online teaching. I suspect that there may also be some high-performing students who prefer the flexibility that online learning allows them (and the research highlighted in this post seems to suggest that might be the case). That will help in forming policies for flexible learning options that better suit all students.

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