Murray State Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

Online education is growing in popularity. Traditional schooling is losing the monopoly of being the only teaching method available to students (Nguyen, 2015). Online learning has evolved throughout the development of online education (Sun & Chen, 2016). Many schools focus on the core content classes for online education like math, science, social studies, and English language arts, but school systems are starting to grow their curricula (Bedard & Knox-Pipes, 2006). This quantitative study was a comparative analysis of an online and traditionally taught agricultural education course. Middle school students completed 12 assignments throughout six weeks. The grades from the assignments were taken and analyzed through descriptive statistics and independent t-tests. The t-test for each assignment showed that 11 out of the 12 assignments had no significant difference, and there was no significant difference between the traditional and online courses as a whole. For the online class to be considered a successful alternative to the traditionally taught agricultural education course, it had to score an overall average of over 80%, which it did. Traditional students scored better on the majority of the assignments, but the online class showed more overall growth from the pre-test to the post-test. Both courses were deemed successful, and no significant difference was found between the two courses.

Year manuscript completed

2023

Year degree awarded

2023

Author's Keywords

online agriculture, agricultural education, online education, instructional technology

Dissertation Committee Chair

Kristie Guffey

Committee Member

Alyx Shultz

Committee Member

Daphne Winkler

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

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