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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-5529 |
| Date | 01 January 2014 |
| Creators | Wilson, William |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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