Distance Writing--Blog Post #1

In “Influences of Online Delivery on Developmental Writing Outcomes,” published in the Journal of Developmental Education, Trudy Carpenter, William Brown, and Randall Hickman, all from community colleges around Michigan, share results on developmental students' success and retention rates in online writing courses. As the authors point out, the conventional wisdom has been to steer developmental writers away from online classes for fear that the online environment adds technological barriers to a population that already has an uncertain future of success.Carpenter, Brown, and Hickman complicate this assumption in productive ways.

The authors studied a group of 256 developmental students who self-selected online developmental writing courses over a period of four years. In comparison to the students who comprised the general population of developmental education at Lansing Community College, the students in the online group tended to be "older, female, white, and part-time, with higher reading and writing placement scores" (15). A veteran composition teacher might notice that this describes what is generally the highest-performing group in a community-college writing class, possibly skewing the data; however, the authors attempted to control for all of these variables, as well as student credit load, time of registration, and math placement scores.

The two variables of key interest to the researchers were completion rate (i.e., whether students finished the course) and success rate, which they defined as a final grade of 2.5 or higher. The authors found that delivery method was a reliable predictor of both retention and success--in opposing ways. Carpenter, Brown, and Hickman found that students were less likely to complete online developmental writing courses, yet if students completed the course, they did better in it. Their data suggest that "there are some things about online instruction as  delivery method that lead to greater withdrawal rates but that may ultimately lead to success rates for those students who finish the course that are comparable to, if not greater than, success rates in traditional, face-to-face instruction" (16). They admit that the greater withdrawal rate may have indirectly affected the greater success rate, since poorly performing students may have dropped rather than sticking it out and receiving a poor grade. However, it is difficult to ascertain whether this was the case. An additional limitation is that all of the online sections were taught by the same instructor. The authors attempted to control for this by comparing success and withdrawal rates between this instructor's face-to-face sections and those taught by other instructors, and they did not find a statistically significant difference. However, the possibility remains that their sample group was too limited for their results to be generalized.

Despite these difficulties, the study serves as an interesting data-driven rebuttal to those who say developmental writing courses are recipes for disaster. Instead, the study’s findings suggest that developmental writing classes may be a viable alternative to conventional instruction and merit more consideration.