Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2008. / Adviser: Thomas Wan. Includes bibliographical references (p. 150-160).

Student participation in online courses has been growing steadily for the past decade, and the trend appears to continue the growth in this form of instructional delivery method for the foreseeable future (iNACOL, 2012). To date, little research exploring student success rates exists in the social studies. This particular study was conducted to examine what differences, if any, existed in the End-Of-Course (EOC) scores of 11th grade United States history students who took the course in a traditional, face-to-face format versus students who took the same course online through Florida Virtual School. For this study, proper permission was received from all interested parties, and a sample of 9,339 End of Course (EOC) examinations were taken from 36 high schools in a large, urban school district in Central Florida. All identifiable data were scrubbed from the sample. Due to the extremely small sampling of online students, the One-Sample Wilcoxon test was used on four research questions to compare students in the traditional, face-to-face versus online format and based on ethnicity, gender, and free-and-reduced lunch status. Overall, none of the One-Sample Wilcoxon tests indicated the presence of a significant difference among any subgroup-overall, White, non-White, female, male, high socioeconomic status, or low socioeconomic status. Therefore, none of the null hypotheses presented were rejected. Recommendations included replicating the study on a broader scale and conducting a qualitative study to examine the characteristics of online students, their similarities and differences, to those of students who attend class in a face-to-face format.

Florida Virtual School (FLVS) was established in 1997 as an online education alternative for the residents of Florida. The purpose of this study was to identify policy changes at the organizational, state, and federal levels that had the propensity to impact student success (as measured by student's final letter grade) at FLVS. In addition, this study identified which type of institutional isomporphic policy (coercive, mimetic, or normative) best classified major policy changes in the organization from 1997-2007. The use of institutional theory as the guiding framework for this study proved to be beneficial and enabled the researcher to conclude which types of policy are the most effective in increasing student success in the secondary online education environment. This study utilized ANOVA and regression analysis to detect whether or not changes in policy at the organizational and federal level have a statistically significant impact on student success in the secondary online education environment. This study reveals that student success at FLVS is consistently decreasing and that the change is statistically significant. Regression analysis found that the policy changes at FLVS in this study explain some of the variance detected in the change in the mean, or GPA, of the school. This study found that both coercive and mimetic policies have a statistically significant impact on student success in the secondary online education environment as identified in the isomorphic mechanisms outlined in institutional theory. This study is important to the field of literature regarding secondary online education in that it opens the discussion regarding types of policy and the potential impact that policy changes have on student success in the secondary online education environment. In addition, this study serves as a framework upon which future studies can be conducted and are recommended in this study.

Online schooling is the newest form of education and it is quickly gaining popularity. However, this educational format also comes with one of the challenges that has always been present in schools, which is academic dishonesty. In the English Language Arts content area, academic dishonesty is most often manifested as plagiarism, however, cheating on online quizzes or exams still exists. Although this issue has always been present in English classes, it is becoming more of a concern because of the vast number of technological resources available to students including websites with pre-written papers and the various methods students can now use to instantly communicate with each other. This study combines and synthesizes a literature review and a survey of secondary online English educators at Florida Virtual School to give their perspective on aspects of cheating and plagiarism in online English education including a comparison between online and face to face academic dishonesty, reasons students cheat or plagiarize in online education and attitudes toward academic dishonesty, how students cheat and plagiarize in online classes, how teachers detect academic dishonesty in their online classes, consequences and policies of academic dishonesty in online education, and preventing academic dishonesty in online education. The overall new finding, from comparing both the literature review and the FLVS survey results, was that academic dishonesty in online education is not vastly different from academic dishonesty in face to face classrooms; therefore, academic dishonesty in the online environment is not as much of a mystery as commonly perceived. The survey did, however, expand the knowledge about online academic dishonesty at the secondary level, and specifically in the English Language Arts content area.