Wasted on the Young? Comparing the Performance and Attitudes of Younger and Older US Adults in an Online Class on Geographic Information

Abstract

This study investigates the counter-intuitive observation that older students tend to thrive better than younger students in online classes. We use a variety of measures to compare performance and attitudes of undergraduates and continuing adult professionals in separate but nearly identical class sections led by the same instructor at a US university during the same nine-month study period. Findings are consistent with theoretical predictions about differences in readiness of younger and older adults for self-directed learning experiences. Results also suggest that online educators should be proactive in stimulating younger students' participation in class discussions, and should find ways to evaluate explicitly the tacit learning that online discussion can foster.

Keywords:

• GIS/S
• online learning
• e-learning
• web-based
• age
• motivation

Acknowledgements

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) supported this research through Award IIS #0229210, Digital Libraries Supporting Innovative Approaches to Learning and Teaching in Geography. Views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect those of the NSF. The authors thank colleague Elizabeth Bailey for conducting and transcribing the telephone interviews. We also thank the editors and reviewers for their constructive critiques and helpful suggestions.

Notes

A version of this paper was presented by David DiBiase as the Journal of Geography in Higher Education Annual Lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Las Vegas, Nevada, 25–29 March 2009.

¹ The lessons are now available as an open educational resource at http://natureofgeoinfo.org

² PERL is an open source, cross-platform programming language that provides comprehensive string handling functions that makes it especially useful for processing text data. Additional information is available at http://www.perl.org

³ Turnitin.com is a commercial plagiarism-detection service that compares the textual content of digital documents uploaded by authorized instructors and/or students with the content of documents uploaded previously or published in the Web.