Assessing the Impact of Blended Learning on Student Performance

This paper assesses quantitatively the impact on student performance of a blended learning experiment within a large undergraduate first-year course in statistics for business and economics students. We employ a difference-in-differences method, which controls for differences in student characteristics and course delivery method, to evaluate the impact of blended learning on student performance. Our results suggest that the impact of blended learning on student performance depends on whether the effect of blended learning is cumulative or not. Blended learning has no impact on student performance if learning is non-cumulative and only affects the performance on the quizzes associated with the material covered by blended learning. However, if learning is cumulative and impacts the performance for the whole course, then our results strongly suggest a strong, negative effect. Taken as a whole, these results provide a possible explanation for why most of the existing studies focusing on short online courses have obtained neutral or even positive results while nearly all the studies focusing on semester-length course tend to observe negative impacts from online learning.