EAST LANSING, Mich. - A study conducted by two economics professors at Michigan State University found that students in a virtual economics course performed significantly worse on examinations than their counterparts in the live sections. The professors suggest that online courses are better at teaching basic concepts than they are at developing complex analytical skills and that students who are considering taking such courses should carefully weigh both the advantages and disadvantages of the online format.

"These results differ sharply from the vast majority of studies in the education field that continue to claim there is no significant difference between live and virtual courses," said Carl Liedholm, one of the study's authors.

In the study to be published this spring in the journal American Economic Review, Liedholm and Byron Brown compare student performance in their "Principles of Microeconomics" course, taught during the 2000-01 academic year. Two sections of the course were taught live in the classroom. The course was offered twice in a virtual format and once in a format that combined classroom instruction with online materials.

The virtual format included a wide variety of online learning tools and activities, including streaming video of classroom lectures with synchronous viewing of texts, enabling the online students to see and hear the same lectures as students in the classroom. Performance on 37 questions common to all the students' examinations was compared.

"Although virtual courses seem to be effective in helping students learn basic concepts, they are less successful at helping students learn how to apply those concepts on problems that require analytical thinking," said Brown. "Students in the classroom did significantly better than the online students on the most complex material."

This was found to be true even though the students taking the course online had significantly higher ACT comprehensive scores and had completed more credits toward graduation than the students in the classroom sections.

The researchers speculate that this result may reflect the benefits and importance of the direct student-teacher interactions that occur in live classes. The better performance of the students in face-to-face classes could also be due to differences in student effort.

"We found that those students spent more time on the course than their virtual class counterparts," said Liedholm, "so it is possible that this added effort contributed to their superior performance on problems requiring in-depth analysis."

However, one group -- female students -- seemed to benefit from the online format.

"Women were at a significant disadvantage in the live sections of the course, where they scored almost six percentage points lower than male students on the examination," said Brown.

There was no significant difference in test performance between men and women taking the course online.

"This finding is consistent with previous research showing that many women perform better in online courses than they do in the same courses taught in a classroom," said Brown.

"Classroom dynamics favor students who can come up with a correct answer or observation quickly," he said. "The virtual setting removes that pressure and seems to promote achievement across a variety of learning styles."

Although men and women performed at similar levels in the online course, those levels were still well below the performance of students in the live course.

"Students need to know that there are important differences between live and virtual classes," said Liedholm. "Doing as well in an online course as in the live alternative seems to require extra work or discipline, especially when it comes to learning the more difficult concepts."

Liedholm and Brown plan to continue teaching the online sections of their course and may add tips on time allocation to the syllabus.

"For a certain subset of students, including those who are highly motivated and those who need the convenience of accessing the course from off-campus, online education serves a definite need," Brown said.

"For others, classroom instruction will remain the best delivery system," he said. "Students need to think about their own learning styles and make course choices accordingly."
 

---Michigan State University

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