Abstract
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a tremendous expansion in the provision of online education, especially at the tertiary level, it was a sector that was already growing pre-2019. Research from both before and after the outbreak of the coronavirus has tended to compare student satisfaction levels or results in terms of performance for face-to-face and online modes of teaching/learning. However, the focus of the present study was rather to examine the effect of increasing familiarity with online learning on student performance. It was hypothesized that there was likely to be a negative impact in the early days that would decrease after a year or so of experience with classes and tests in the new mode. This research is a small-scale case study at one university (Musashino University), with two groups of similar ability students including both male and female students and a similar proportion of international and Japanese students in each group. Their English reading comprehension was assessed at the beginning and end of a one-semester EFL Reading class using the online standard Placement Test provided by the Extensive Reading Foundation (originally acknowledged as suitable for such use (Brierley, 2019) to determine improvement over the semester. The data for the two groups (April-July 2020 and September 2021-February 2022) were analyzed using SPSS software. The results showed that there was noticeable improvement in average performance after a longer time online, but the difference was not statistically significant, nor affected by gender or nationality. The contribution of the findings is discussed.
Author Information
Anne C. Ihata, Musashino University, Japan
Takaaki Ihata, Nihon University, Japan
Paper Information
Conference: ACE2022
Stream: Teaching Experiences
This paper is part of the ACE2022 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Ihata A., & Ihata T. (2023) Online Classes: Does Increased Familiarity With the Mode of Teaching Actually Lead to Improved Learner Performance? ISSN: 2186-5892 The Asian Conference on Education 2022: Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-5892.2023.34
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-5892.2023.34
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