How Does Distance Education Compare With Classroom Instruction? A Meta-Analysis of the Empirical Literature

TLDR

A meta‑analysis of 232 studies (688 outcomes) on distance education from 1985 to 2002 was conducted. Overall effect sizes were essentially zero with wide variability, indicating that synchronous distance education tends to underperform classroom instruction while asynchronous formats sometimes outperform it, though heterogeneity remained.

Abstract

A meta-analysis of the comparative distance education (DE) literature between 1985 and 2002 was conducted. In total, 232 studies containing 688 independent achievement, attitude, and retention outcomes were analyzed. Overall results indicated effect sizes of essentially zero on all three measures and wide variability. This suggests that many applications of DE outperform their classroom counterparts and that many perform more poorly. Dividing achievement outcomes into synchronous and asynchronous forms of DE produced a somewhat different impression. In general, mean achievement effect sizes for synchronous applications favored classroom instruction, while effect sizes for asynchronous applications favored DE. However, significant heterogeneity remained in each subset.