Having coursework presented both online and in-person can make students less likely to withdraw from a class or experience test anxiety, a new study suggests.
Researchers at the University of Iowa analyzed the way students perceived the delivery of content in a classroom and found that having a “blended” course format, in which content is presented both online and in weekly class meetings, can be beneficial to students.
The study was recently presented at the American Physiological Society (APS) Institute on Teaching and Learning.
Understanding how students learn
Jennifer Rogers, a lecturer of human physiology at the University of Iowa and lead author of the study, sought to understand the way students were absorbing information in her class.
“I really wanted to learn more about perceptions of how I was teaching, but also learn more about how students were learning because there’s a little bit of a difference between what I think I’m doing and what students are actually learning in the course,” she said.
To do this, Rogers began speaking with experts from the Office of Teaching, Learning, and Technology on campus and offered some thoughts based on her own observations.
“One of the things we were talking about is self-efficacy, or the belief in one’s ability to accomplish a task,” she said. “And it just seemed like some students were high on the self-efficacy scale and some weren’t, which led me to question ‘well, what can I do as the instructor and how can I arrange course content to boost self-efficacy and therefore boost course performance’?”
Based on this question, Rogers and a team of researchers set out to analyze the way students perceived different types of physiology courses throughout three different semesters — spring, summer and fall.
They looked at six physiology courses taught by Rogers — two online courses, two traditional lecture courses, and two blended courses.
The content was the exact same for each course, except for the manner in which information was delivered from the professor to the student, and vice versa.
In online classes, for example, students submitted their assignments and corresponded with the professor via online platforms. In contrast, the traditional lecture students attended weekly class meetings. In the blended classes, students were given assignments online as well as required to meet once a week for in-class activities.
While the traditional lecture classes were large (100-200 students), the blended classes were much smaller (one had 40 and the other only 28 students).
Additionally, in the blended courses, the weekly in-class meetings were not formal lectures. Instead, they provided an opportunity for students to work in groups, ask questions, and interact with one another.
At the end of the semester, the researchers asked students to complete a survey for extra credit so they could gather data. The survey included questions concerning their general impressions of the class, and various motivation factors such as self-efficacy, intrinsic value and test anxiety.
The findings
The researchers received a 80 percent response rate, or information from 414 students for the survey.
They found that students who chose the blended format reported less test anxiety at the end of the semester than those who studied solely online, suggesting that face-to-face engagement could hold important value in a classroom.
Additionally, the researchers found that students in the blended section were less likely to drop the class, and performed higher than the other students overall.
“Greater than 95 percent of students enrolled in the blended course section earned course grades [of] C- or higher, compared with 82 percent in the large lecture sections and 81 percent in the online sections,” Rogers said in a statement.
The research points to the prospect that having a more varied learning experience can be beneficial to students.
“One of the really important aspects of the study was that all the students took the exact same exams and had all the same course work,” said Rogers. “So really the only variable that was modulated was the course format. So with the blended course, the same content was presented, but being able to meet in class and talk about how to integrate the different ideas, and having students work in groups to talk about it among themselves … some students commented that they found this really helpful.”
Rogers also found that she benefited from teaching blended courses.
“The blended course format was really nice because we could have two-way conversations,” she said. “I could pick the content that I felt was most important for students to understand, they could talk about it among themselves, I could walk around the classroom and interact with the students and the different groups, therefore I felt I had a better idea about what the questions were, what students were and weren’t understanding.”
What’s next?
Rogers and her team plan on further studies to continue learning about the way students perceive course content delivery.
“We do anticipate doing follow-up data analysis that will help illustrate how students are learning,” she said.
They also plan to integrate a blended course format for an upcoming human anatomy course.
