A formative evaluation of a high school blended learning biology course

Restricted until 13 July 2010.As growing student populations continue to tax the resources of public high schools, administrators are constantly looking for ways to address the needs of all students. One option for increasing the number of students in a classroom without sacrificing quality of instruction is to use "blended learning ". Blended learning is defined by Marsh et al. (2003, p.2) as a situation where " face-to-face and distance education delivery methods and resources are merged" . In such a course, students receive the benefits of classroom-based instruction, while also benefiting from several aspects of distance learning. This is especially true for science courses that rely heavily on both hands-on labs and various multimedia.; The purpose of this study was a formative evaluation of a high school blended learning biology course, focusing on a genetics unit. The research question addressed by the study was "Will participants increase their domain knowledge and problem-solving skills after instruction in a high school level blended distance learning biology course?" Also investigated was if higher levels of self-regulation skills were correlated to higher levels of content-understanding and problem-solving. The study was composed of a pilot study and a main study. Participants were students in an urban Southern California public high school biology course. Classroom instruction was from a single instructor, and online content was managed using the "Moodle" course management system. Participants were assessed for their gains in genetics content-understanding, genetics problem-solving skills (Punnett squares), and self-regulation. Additionally, participant reactions to the blended instruction model were surveyed. Results indicated that significant increases (p<.05) in content-understanding and problem-solving occurred, though self-regulation skills were not shown to be significantly correlated to increasedcontent-understanding, or problem-solving skills. Participants reacted positively to the blended model, suggesting that it be used more often in their classes