Exploring Teachers' Influence on Student Success in an Online Biology Course. REL 2021-056 (original) (raw)

2021, Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast

Instruction plays a critical role in student success. However, most studies of teachers' effects on student learning focus on face-to-face settings. Some aspects of online courses, such as the choice of synchronous or asynchronous instruction and the course structure, might reduce teachers' influence on their students. This study of an online high school biology course offered by Florida Virtual School examined the variation in students' course segment (similar to semester) completion rates, end-ofsegment exam scores, and time to segment completion that is attributable to the influence of teachers. Students' scores on the end-of-segment exam varied only slightly across teachers, while completion rates and time to completion varied more. Why this study? The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has turned a spotlight on K-12 virtual-space learning. In the United States many school districts switched from in-person teaching to remote learning, in which students and teachers work together synchronously in the virtual space for a large part of the students' learning time (see box 1 for definitions of key terms). This model attempts to directly replicate in the virtual school space many of the teacher-student interactions that occur in the traditional school space. However, other online learning programs differ from this model in significant ways, mainly by allowing students to spend much of their time with virtual course materials asynchronously. This study began before the pandemic and focuses on online learning in a school with asynchronous instruction. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the growing popularity of online instruction prompted questions about teachers' influence on student success. Leaders of Florida Virtual School, one of the largest virtual school networks in the nation, observed that some teachers had consistently better outcomes for students in their online classes. The school leaders asked the Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast to help identify teaching practices that might be associated with better student outcomes. Their goal was to identify promising practices for further investigation and eventually to encourage teachers to adopt the practices that proved more effective. If a practice was related to improved outcomes, Florida Virtual School staff planned to incorporate it into their teacher training program. Teachers' instructional practices can directly affect student outcomes. Prior studies on teacher effectiveness in different grades and subjects, most commonly reading and math, have found varying results (for summaries, see Nye et al., 2004; Schochet & Chiang, 2010). For example, across different cohorts and elementary school grades, one study reported classroom effect sizes on students' achievement of 0.21 to 0.42 (Rowan et al. (2002). In contrast, another study found much smaller teacher effect sizes of 0.10 in reading and 0.11 in math across grades 3-7 (Rivkin et al., 2005). In short, research agrees that teachers influence student outcomes, but the size of the impact can vary considerably depending on the context.