Students who are unable or unwilling to attend classes at an educational institution can often study at home through distance education programs. A consistently noted problem for students in these programs centres on the isolation experienced in such independent study. This sense of isolation may be one of the causes of the high drop-out rates common in distance education.
The hypothesis of this study was that interaction with other students via telephone conferencing would decrease the drop-out rate, increase student satisfaction and improve academic performance.
Twenty-nine students from a community college in British Columbia were involved in the study. They completed a questionnaire measuring the personality constructs "need for affiliation", "need for achievement" and "need for autonomy". They were randomly assigned to either the treatment or control group. Members of the treatment group participated in telephone conferences with the course instructor and three or four other students. Members of the control group received only individual telephone calls from the instructor. The completion rates of the two groups, measures of satisfaction and marks were compared.
Only 2 of the 15 students in the treatment group dropped out while 7 of the 14 students in the control group failed to complete the course. The chi square with one degree of freedom was 4.55 significant at the .03 level. A Yates correction for continuity of curve, which was applied because of the small numbers, lowered the significance to .08.
Differences in measures of student satisfaction were not statistically significant.
For all students there was a moderate correlation between student achievement as measured by marks and need for affiliation, r=-.38, p=.10. However, when the correlation was computed for the treatment group only, r was -.11, p=.72, but for the control group only, the correlation was r=-.70, p=.08. This suggests that for the treatment group student-to-student interaction may have moderated the effect of the students' need for affiliation on student performance.
The results indicate that student-to-student interaction may be beneficial to students in distance education courses and that need for affiliation may play a role in student success. Further study is recommended. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/25803 |
| Date | January 1985 |
| Creators | Persons, Heather Jamieson |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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