The Effect of Face-to-Face and Blended Education of General Prerequisite Courses on Post-Requisite Courses for Technical Students

Abstract

Introduction: The development of communication technology has had significant effects on educational methods, and the evaluation of its benefits over traditional methods is under study. Accordingly, the present research is studying the effect of face-to-face and blended education of pre-requisite general courses on post-requisite courses for technical students studying in two-year colleges.Materials and Methods: This research is a prospective enquiry, with both a control and an experiment group, on the performance of 642 technical students of Bahonar technical college of Shiraz entering the college in 2009. Their performance was evaluated in the pre-requisite courses of English, Physics and Mathematics taught through two blended and face-to-face methods. The students were to be a representative of technical students (except fields of agriculture, art and science) of District 4 of Technical and Vocational University (including Fars, Bushehr, Hormozgan and Kohkiluyeh provinces in Iran). The data were gathered through paper-based exams and questionnaires, being analyzed via t-test, variance analysis and partial coefficient correlation and beta coefficients. The students' performance was compared with their following year performance on the associated post-requisite courses. The validity of the tests was confirmed by experienced teachers and their reliability was found to be 0.891, 0.748 and 0.869 for Pre-requisite math, physics and English, respectively using Cronbach alpha. For the data analysis, SPSS software version 19 was used.Results: The results showed that the means of the scores for the students with face-to-face education was more than those for their counterparts with the blended education: General Math (7%), Prerequisite Physics (39%), Prerequisite English (8%) and General Physics (9%) (0.001