Academic Performance, Age, Gender, and Ethnicity in Online Courses Delivered by Two-Year Colleges

Abstract

This study investigated the effects the demographic variables age, gender, and ethnicity and their interactions had on academic performance in online courses delivered by public two-year colleges in Kentucky. The study controlled for previous academic performance measured by cumulative grade point average (GPA). The study used a random sample (N ¼ 320) of all students who had enrolled in at least one online course delivered by the institutions of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System in the spring 2008 semester. A linear hierarchical multiple regression acting as ANCOVA served as the main analysis, with the order entry as follows: cumulative GPA; independent variables (age, gender, ethnicity); interaction vectors; and product vectors. Final course grade served as the dependent variable. The results of the analysis indicated that only cumulative GPA was a significant predictor, explaining approximately 40% of the variance of the final grade. Although differences in final grades were present among the variables age and ethnicity, these differences disappeared when controlling for cumulative GPA. Significance of the results and recommendations for future research are discussed.

Predictors of academic performance in the discipline‐specific bioscience paper: a retrospective qualitative study

“…Similarly, a significant correlation between age and grade point average in an online course was not demonstrated when the factor of previous academic performance was controlled, and the authors concluded that age is not a demographic variable that Correlation is significant at the 0.000 level (two-tailed). needs to be considered even for online courses when selecting students (19). Their finding of age not being predictive of academic performance whilst prior academic achievement is controlled is similar to our statistical findings with the multivariable regression analysis.…”

Strengths-Based Analysis of Student Success in Online Courses

“…A second example of antithetical results related to race or ethnicity. Several studies found no relationship with student success in online learning (Aragon & Johnson, 2008;Gibson et al, 2010;Harrell & Bower, 2011;Jost, Rude-Parkins, & Githens, 2012). Some, however, found race combined with other factors yielded a significant association with success (Cochran et al, 2014;Rockinson-Szapkiw, Wendt, Wighting, & Nisbet, 2016;Suphi & Yaratan, 2012).…”

“…Evaluating factors of success across multiple class levels in a single study provided a unique and significant contribution that may help to explain some of the contradictions in previous research. Some previous studies, for example, considered targeted populations, such as community college students (Hachey et al, 2014;Jost et al, 2012) or graduate students (Rakap, 2010;Rockinson-Szapkiw et al, 2016). Other studies evaluated a broad population without examining the predictive factors for a given subpopulation (Levy, 2007;Wang et al, 2013).…”

Does Context Matter? Investigating Factors Related to Students’ Academic Achievement in Classroom and Online Courses

“…academic achievement in online learning environments, i.e., what are good predictors of online course grades? As previously mentioned (see section 2.2), students' GPA is positively and significantly related to their grades in online courses (e.g., Cheung & Kan, 2002;Jost et al, 2012;Wojciechowski & Palmer, 2005). However, this might not be a suitable predictor when faced with a population that has no or little experience with higher education.…”

“…In addition, GPA has been found to be positively and significantly related to grades in online courses. Thus, students with higher GPAs do better in online courses compared to students with lower GPAs (e.g., Cheung & Kan, 2002;Jost, Rude-Parkins, & Githens, 2012;Wojciechowski & Palmer, 2005).…”