Age, Gender, and Student Success: Mixing Face-to-Face and Online Courses in Political Science

Abstract

Once on the fringes of higher education, online learning is now mainstream. Today, there are fewer entirely online or entirely face-to-face students; increasingly, college students are taking courses in a variety of instructional formats. How might this new reality of diverse modalities affect student success? Does a greater or lesser proportion of online classes in a student’s course load lead to different levels of success? And how might these outcomes be conditioned by demographic variables such as age and gender? We explore these questions using data from 761 students in the Political Science Department at the University of Central Florida (UCF), a large public university. Our findings indicate that overall student success varies by the specific mix of course delivery modalities students are enrolled in and is conditioned by demographic variables. For instance, the data show that younger female students tend to do well with any mix of course modalities, but older male students are less successful as they take a greater proportion of their courses online. These results indicate that a changing academic culture regarding online education may not affect all students equally.

Keywords:

• Gender
• online learning
• undergraduate education
• age

Notes

Notes on contributors

Rebecca A. Glazier is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. In addition to her work on pedagogy, Rebecca studies religion, framing, and U.S. foreign policy.

Kerstin Hamann (PhD Washington University) is Pegasus Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Central Florida. Her research interests focus on Spanish politics and the role of organized labor in Western Europe as well as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Her books include The Politics of Industrial Relations: Labor Unions in Spain and Parties, Elections, and Policy Reforms in Western Europe: Voting for Social Pacts (with John Kelly). Her research has been published in numerous book chapters and journals, among others Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Journal of Political Science Education, and PS: Political Science & Politics. Hamann previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Political Science Education.

Philip H. Pollock is Professor of Political Science at the University of Central Florida, where he teaches courses in American politics and data analysis. He has authored several books on research methods with CQ Press, including The Essentials of Political Analysis (5th edition, 2016), An SPSS Companion to Political Analysis (5th edition, 2016), A Stata Companion to Political Analysis (3rd edition, 2015), and An R Companion to Political Analysis (2014). He previously served as coeditor of the Journal of Political Science Education.

Bruce M. Wilson (PhD Washington University) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Central Florida and Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, Norway where he is PI for a Norwegian Research Council grant on the “Human Right to Water.” His research on Latin American politics has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals including Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Latin American Studies, Comparative Politics, the Journal of Health and Human Rights, and the International Journal of Constitutional Law. His coauthored work on the scholarship of teaching and learning has appeared in Journal of Political Science Education, PS: Politics and Political Science among other peer-reviewed journals. His most recent book, Courts and Power in Latin America and Africa was published in 2010. He previously served as coeditor of the Journal of Political Science Education.

Notes

1 These findings also apply to the general student population at UCF, where our case study is conducted. At UCF, more women than men tend to enroll in online courses; online students are on average older than those enrolling in comparable face-to-face courses; and about half of the students in online courses work full-time. Online courses have on average “slightly lower success rates and higher withdrawal rates” than face-to-face courses, while women tend to have higher success rates than men regardless of the course delivery mode (RITE n.d.).

2 Few studies have looked at gender and the modality of course delivery in political science; Wilson, Pollock, and Hamann (2006), for example, analyze courses delivered partially online (“mixed” or “blended” courses) and find that women have higher learning gains (for an additional study on gender in online political science courses, see also Pollock, Hamann, and Wilson 2005).

3 Starting in Summer 2016, students have had the option of enrolling at UCF as designated online students, which excludes them from taking face-to-face courses. The data used here, however, are from Fall 2015, when such an online designation did not exist.

4 The department offers very few blended courses; in Fall 2015, no courses were designated as blended. Therefore, we excluded blended courses from our analysis.

5 These grade designations for “successful” or “unsuccessful” course completion are commonly used in higher education (see Moskal and Dziuban 2001).

6 The frequency distribution on which Figure 1 is based is not shown but is available from the authors.

7 There is no consensus in the literature about what constitutes an “older” or “nontraditional” student. Here, we follow the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES n.d.) study, which states that “students 23 or older were identified as older than typical and considered nontraditional.”