Virtual and Traditional

Education
EDP 520
Larry Steinberg
Joo Yun
Research Question
If removed from a traditional
educational setting, do students in
grades 9 - 11 that attend school in a
virtual environment perform better
on required standardized
assessments?
If traditional forms of bias are
removed from the educational
setting, is there a significant
difference in student performance?


Problem
If students are removed from the traditional
educational setting that contains biases, then
students that historically scored poorly will
perform better on standardized assessments.
Literature Review
Advantages of virtual education
o Time effectiveness
o Enhanced communication with
teacher
o Connecting with learners global wide
o Traditional issues like behavior,
expectation, and attitudes are
removed.
Disadvantages of traditional classroom
o Cultural bias
o Content bias
o Gender bias
o Limited approach to embrace all types
of students' learning style
Literature Review (cont'd)
No significant differences between K-12
distance education and traditional education
in academic achievement
Virtual charter school students do not score
lower that non-virtual school students
o Indicator of the success of distance education
Methodology
1,000 students (500 from traditional high
school in LBUSD and 500 from virtual
charter school called Connections Academy)
Instrumentation: STAR scores
Other correlations between variables (gender
and ethnicity
Stratified Sampling
Data Analysis
Use interval scales of measurement, summarize the overall
tendencies in the data (central tendency such as mean,
median, and mode and variability such as range and standard
deviation)
Utilize independent samples t-test with the level of
significance of 0.05
Continuous dependent variable will be the STAR score
Decide whether to reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis