Research Design Questions

Course delivery modalities are critical predictors of student achievement in any course presented to students. The efficiency of course delivery styles varies depending on the situation and the courses offered to students (Robertson, 2014). Thus, delivery modalities can be observed to have a major impact on the performance and satisfaction of learners, who may have differing perspectives and beliefs about the use of various forms. The current essay outlines a research design that may be utilized to assess the most effective course delivery format that will result in the best achievement in the psychological statistics class.  The research design proposed seeks to assess the course delivery methods that may result in the best performance in psychological statistics class. The study will answer the question: what is the most effective course delivery format for achieving the optimum student performance in psychological statistics class.

Hypothesis

The research hypothesizes that if a blend of delivery methods is used, then there will be better performance of the students of in psychological statistics class. The alternate hypothesis is that the format used has a significant impact on the performance of the students. On the other hand, the null hypothesis indicates that there is no significant difference between the performance results of the on-line and face-to-face formats used in psychological statistics class.

Type of Research Design

The research design will be mainly quantitative in nature as it will involve the assessment of the students’ percentage mean scores and grades after the use of a delivery format. The variable collected (students’ percentage mean scores in psychological statistics) is quantitative in nature. Three groups of students taking the same psychological course through the three delivery methods will be assessed on their performance of the same test. The type research design is descriptive as it provides the description of the performance that is expected in each of the course delivery format. The study will only

Level of Measurement of Variables

The scale of measure used in the proposed study will entail a description of the information regarding the course delivery formats. The nominal scale represents the classification of data based on the qualitative information represented by the variables (De Vaus, 2013). The examples of variables that could be measured on a nominal scale in the present case may include the grades obtained by the students in the course under various delivery methods. Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 can be used to represent the grades A, B, C, D, and E respectively. The nominal can, therefore, be used to measure the qualitative aspects of the student performance as determined by the course delivery formats. The ordinal scale refers to the order in which the measurement of the variables is done. Through the use of the scale, the results can be sorted in a particular manner so as to obtain an order of merit. The order of performance from all the course delivery formats can, therefore, be measured and ranked based on the ordinal scale as first, second and third depending on the scores that are obtained by the students from each of the delivery methods. The use ordinal scale can be deployed further to rank students as high, average and low scoring.

Interval scales are used to provide order in numeric values as well as providing the ability to extract the differences between the values that are obtained from the individual cases of the course delivery formats (De Vaus, 2013). The interval levels can be used in the present study to determine the degree of differences between the performances obtained from the different groups of the method of course delivery. For instance, the interval scale can be used to infer that the performance in blended delivery format is twice as better as than the performance in the face-to-face format. The ratio range provides the ability to represent the nominal, interval and ordinal measurement. The ratio scale can be used to measure the variation of the values of data that are presented.

Use of Descriptive Statistics

Descriptive statistics will be used in the proposed research in preference to inferential statistics (Howell, 2012). Descriptive statistics is the most suitable for use in the present study as it enables the utilization of the processed data to analyze dynamics of a population. The descriptive statistics will be used to describe the performance of students from each case of the method of course delivery after calculation of mean and median scores obtained by the students.

Sample Frequency Distribution

The table below represents a simple frequency distribution that can be obtained from the performance in the three cases of course delivery. The grouped frequency distribution has been used due to the large number of students whose percentage scores (variable) are being evaluated in the proposed study. The number of students in all the cases is 50.

Percentage Score Limits

Face-to-face format

Online

Blended

20-29

2

3

0

30-39

6

4

5

40-49

19

25

12

50-59

11

10

10

60-69

7

4

14

70-79

3

2

6

80-89

2

2

4

90-99

0

0

3

References

De Vaus, D. (2013). Surveys in social research. Routledge.

Howell, D. C. (2012). Statistical methods for psychology. Cengage Learning.

Robertson, P. R. (2014). Comparing student performance and satisfaction in face-to-face and hybrid formats for a finance course. American Journal of Educational Research, 2(2), 73.