The impact of course delivery systems on student achievement and sense of community: A comparison of learning community versus stand-alone classroom settings in an open-enrollment inner city public community college.

摘要

This study examined the effects of two types of course delivery systems (learning community classroom environments versus stand-alone classroom environments) on the achievement of students who were simultaneously enrolled in remedial and college-level social science courses at an inner city open-enrollment public community college. This study was designed to compare the differences between these two groups of students in the following areas: participation, cooperation, satisfaction, and retention. This study was performed during the Fall 2008 semester with eight groups of freshmen students. Students from four of these eight groups were enrolled in the learning community course delivery environments. The students from the other four groups were enrolled in comparable stand-alone courses. A combination of quantitative (quasi-experimental) and qualitative (focus group) methods was used to collect and analyze data. Five research questions were posed, and five hypotheses were tested. Eight focus groups were conducted with students, academic mentors, and faculty. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, independent samples t test, One-way ANOVA, and the chi-square test with a minimum alpha of .05. SPSS 17.0 was used to analyze the quantitative data, and QSR NVivo 8 was used to analyze the qualitative data.This study found no statistically significant differences in student achievement and level of retention. However, the students in the learning community classroom environments outperformed students in the stand-alone classroom environments in three out of four subject areas and outperformed the students college-wide in all four subject areas. The retention rate among learning community students was much higher than the college-wide retention rate of this type of students. The levels of participation, cooperation, and satisfaction were higher in the learning community course delivery environments than in the stand-alone course delivery environments. The qualitative data analyses revealed that due to course integration, the learning community students were more able to make interdisciplinary connections between courses than the students in the stand-alone classroom environments the learning community environment facilitated the transfer of learning more than the stand-alone classroom environments. Also, the learning community students felt a greater sense of community and better prepared for their future workplaces than their stand-alone counterparts.