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This meta-analysis of the experimental literature of distance education (DE) compares different types of interaction treatments (ITs) with other DE instructional treatments. ITs are the instructional and/or media conditions designed into DE courses, which are intended to facilitate student-student (SS), student-teacher (ST), or student-content (SC) interactions. Seventy-four DE versus DE studies that contained at least one IT are included in the meta-analysis, which yield 74 achievement effects. The effect size valences are structured so that the IT or the stronger IT (i.e., in the case of two ITs) serve as the experimental condition and the other treatment, the control condition. Effects are categorized as SS, ST, or SC. After adjustment for methodological quality, the overall weighted average effect size for achievement is 0.38 and is heterogeneous. Overall, the results support the importance of the three types of ITs and strength of ITs is found to be associated with increasing achievement outcomes. A strong association is found between strength and achievement for asynchronous DE courses compared to courses containing mediated synchronous or face-to-face interaction. The results are interpreted in terms of increased cognitive engagement that is presumed to be promoted by strengthening ITs in DE courses.
KEYWORDS: distance education, meta-analysis, student interaction, interaction treatment.
Introduction
Review of DE Research
There have been many discussions of how distance education (DE) is similar to and different from face-to-face forms of educational experience. It is not surprising that the distance that separates the activities of teaching and learning, as well as the media that are required to bridge that gap, are among the most commonly cited. Before the dawn of the electronic and then the digital revolutions, it was the postal service that provided the mediating role. It is no wonder that DE (then called "correspondence education") was considered to be a slow and, by some, a second-rate way of educating and being educated (e.g., Thompson, 1990). This type of education started to change in the 1980s as access to digital media provided communication functionality, facilitating more immediate contact between students and instructors. In the 1990s, the Internet and high-speed access began to affect DE courses, bringing them closer to the mainstream of educational practice (Peters, 2003), so that today, applications of online and Web-based DE abound. Evidence...