Student Performance in an Introductory Business Statistics Course: Does Delivery Mode Matter?

Abstract

Approximately 600 undergraduates completed an introductory business statistics course in 2013 in one of two learning environments at Suffolk University, a mid-sized private university in Boston, Massachusetts. The comparison group completed the course in a traditional classroom-based environment, whereas the treatment group completed the course in a flipped-hybrid environment, viewing lecture material online prior to once-a-week, face-to-face meetings. After controlling for observable differences, students in the hybrid environment performed better on the common final exam; however, there were no significant differences in the final grades or student satisfaction between the two environments.

Keywords:

• business statistics
• hybrid
• selection bias
• student performance

Notes

1. Students were first invited to participate in the Bowen et al. (2012) study, which provided monetary or other incentives; if they agreed, they were assigned randomly to F2F or hybrid sections of the course. Thus the randomization was conditional on students agreeing to participate. Of the 3,046 students enrolled in the course at the six campuses, 605 participated in the study, and of these, 292 were assigned to traditional sections and the remaining 313 to hybrid classes. The selection of instructors to teach the hybrid sections was not random either.

2. The catalog description of STATS250 is as follows:

Application of statistical analysis to real-world business and economic problems. Topics include data presentation, descriptive statistics including measures of location and dispersion, introduction to probability, discrete and continuous random variables, probability distributions including binomial and normal distributions, sampling and sampling distributions, statistical inference including estimation and hypothesis testing, simple and multiple regression analysis. The use of computers is emphasized throughout the course. Normally offered each semester.

Before enrolling in the course, students must have successfully completed a course in college-level mathematics.

3. Using the Carnegie classification, regional universities offer a full range of undergraduate programs and some master's programs, but few doctoral programs.