Saint Xavier University’s associate professor and chair of the Department of Psychology, Dr. Angela Pirlott, has recently published a paper on her research on the differences between learning virtually and face-to-face in the context of a psychology statistics class.
Her study was a quasi-experimental design that evaluated students’ quiz and lab performance in the statistics class while controlling for factors such as GPA, gender, ethnicity, and major to limit the nonrandom assignment of participants.
The study included 67 undergraduate students that were taking one of three sections of the Psych-300 class at SXU.
The participants had a range of majors, including psychology, exercise science, and biology. The course was taught by the same instructor and in the same format, with the only exception being whether or not the course was in-person or online.
The measures that were used to track the students’ success included their scores on both quizzes and SPSS labs. The quizzes tested general conceptual understanding of the material and were open-note and open-book.
For the SPSS labs, students were asked to work in pairs and use certain data sets to reach results that they would then have to summarize in a lab report.
Some of the results that were found in her study include that students’ lab performance, which utilized the data analysis tool SPSS, “averaged 4 percentage points lower in the online format”, and their quiz scores “averaged 8 percentage points lower in the online format.”
When asked about the importance of her research, Dr. Pirlott said, “This research is important because some classes might be more challenging to take online and this research compared student performance in a face-to-face versus online section of statistics. The online section appeared to be more difficult, even though the course content was identical.”
She indicated that labs in particular can be more challenging to conduct online because “students were less likely to do their labs collaboratively, with a partner, even though the labs were intended to be done with a partner.”
Dr. Pirlott went on to say that “offering classes online make classes more accessible to students and so it is important to be able to offer courses in a variety of formats including face-to-face and online. However, it is also important to identify possible challenges, which is important for online instructors and administrators to consider when offering online classes.”
She also recommended that psychology students who are eager to do research should take their statistics and research methods classes sooner rather than later, preferably in their sophomore year if possible so that they will be able to assist a faculty member with their research in their junior and senior years.
Although taking an online or in-person course often comes down to preference or ease, it’s important for students to understand that there are significant differences between formats, even if the same material is being taught.
Dr. Pirlott received her Ph.D. in social psychology at Arizona State University and her areas of specialization in research include prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination as well as human mating behaviors.
If you’d like to read any of Dr. Pirlott’s several publications, such as this Huffington Post article on homophobia and sexual prejudices, you can click here and visit her website which lists her publications.