Participation is Predictive of Individual, but Not Group, Work in the Context of a Blended General Education Course

Abstract

Past research on face-to-face instructional delivery demonstrates that students’ participation is positively related to their achievement in a course (Rocca, 2010), and that participation mediates the relation between attendance and achievement (Kim et al., 2019). Given that blended learning is on the rise in higher education (Johnson et al., 2016), it is of growing interest to explore whether this positive association between participation and achievement holds in the context of blended learning. Here we investigated whether students’ participation was (a) predictive of their overall grade in the course and (b) differentially predictive of their grades on three different types of assessments: tests (test and quiz), written assignments (argumentative letter and critical essay), and oral activities (debate). The results of our regression analyses showed that participation grades were predictive of learning achievement in the course with respect to overall grade (R2=0.364; ß=0.365), test grade (R2=0.164; ß==0.327), and written grade (R2=0.212; ß=0.278). Participation was not predictive of oral grades as a whole; however, further analyses showed that students’ participation predicted the individual (vs. group-based) component of the oral grade (R2=0.045; ß=0.113). Thus, our findings demonstrate that students’ participation grades are predictive of their grades on assessments that are independent but not group-based, at least in the context of the blended course investigated in this study.