Examining the effect of blended instructional method on students’ grades in an introductory statistics course

Current consensus holds that blended learning offers students many advantages such as improving their learning outcomes and attitude toward the study of statistics. However, its effect on non-statistics students’ performance in a one-semester introductory course has not been widely studied. This study explored the effect of the blended instructional method on the grades of psychology students in an introductory statistics course at a non-regional Australian university. Students’ course performance and key demographic data were collected from the Student Information System (SIS) and the Learning Management System (LMS). All 541 study participants were first-year psychological science students undertaking the Statistics for Psychology course in the second semesters of 2015 and 2016. The only alteration to the delivery in 2016 was the replacement of face-to-face lectures with video material. Various statistical methods including the independent sample t-test, ANOVA with multiple comparisons as appropriate, and multiple linear regression were used. The results indicate that the final marks for the students were the same, irrespective of the teaching delivery (face-to-face and blended delivery) mode (p = 0.0827) after adjusting for the relevant variables. In conclusion, blended delivery could not be associated with any disadvantageous effect on student learning outcomes.